Chapter 577

The land of Burundi knew hardship. At 71, Kwizera had witnessed a litany of misfortune, born of the earth, bred in the marrow of its inhabitants. Famine, war, disease – these horsemen were not strangers. Yet, the oppressive feeling settling over the land now was something new, something alien.

The sun possessed a venomous glare, the wind carried whispers not of rain, but of rot.

Even the vultures circled higher, as if trying to escape a stench Kwizera couldn't quite place but felt deep in his bones.

He wasn't a fearful man. Life had worn that sensitivity out of him a long time ago.

Still, he couldn't deny the disquiet growing inside him.

His small hut offered little shelter, its mud walls thin against the gathering dread. Outside, the goats bleated nervously, their eyes wide and white in the fading light.

"Quiet, you simpletons," Kwizera mumbled, more to reassure himself than the animals.

He stoked the small fire, the dancing flames a fragile defiance against the encroaching gloom. Tonight, sleep would be hard-won.

The stars that evening seemed different – not distant diamonds, but points of infection pricking the night.

He didn't believe in curses or spirits, not really. Survival left little room for superstition. Yet, looking at that sky, he felt very, very small.

Days turned into weeks, each one more suffocating than the last. The crops withered, the animals sickened, and a terrible quiet replaced the usual village sounds.

People spoke in hushed tones, exchanging frightened looks. The younger ones talked of leaving, of finding some place untouched by the creeping sickness. Kwizera understood their desperation, but where was there to run?

One sweltering afternoon, Kwizera saw it. A distortion, like heat rising off the scorched earth, but wrong.

It danced at the edge of his vision, twisting the landscape, making the trees bend in impossible ways.

He blinked, rubbed his eyes, but it remained. Bigger now, bolder, and closer.

He knew, somehow, that it was the source of the dread. That thing was the sickness made flesh.

It was a towering being of light and shadow, a mass of impossible angles that resolved into no definable shape. Its "eyes" were shimmering rents in reality, showing glimpses of something beyond human understanding.

Panic seized him, cold and absolute. He scrambled back into his hut, the thin walls no protection against such a thing.

He started to pray – something he hadn't done since he was a small child. Pray to anyone, anything, that could stop this nightmare.

A booming something, not a word, not a noise, just a pure statement of presence shattered the quiet. It was the being.

The hut disintegrated, the mud walls turning to dust. Kwizera found himself staring up at the entity, his heart hammering against his ribs.

"So," it resonated, the alien pronouncement vibrating directly inside his skull. "This is the source. This small planet."

Kwizera could only gasp, his mind unable to process the words. He was a goat farmer, not a philosopher.

"I have heard of this place," the being sounded almost bored. "Stories of its corruption, its unending hunger. Tales of greed and cruelty that echo across the galaxies."

"Please," Kwizera managed to choke out, finding his spoken words a struggle in its all-powerful "presence". "We are not all bad. There is kindness too."

The entity made a gesture, an impossible folding of light and space. "Kindness? A fleeting spark in an ocean of darkness. A single flower in a field of thorns."

It swept his surroundings, the movement flattening what little brush grew there into paste. Kwizera could only imagine what its strength was in its true plane of awareness.

"The sickness runs deep. It has poisoned the well. Amputation is the only cure."

Kwizera understood then. This wasn't a monster, not in the way he understood monsters. This was… well, he couldn't put it to words but, from what it spoke, something like a cosmic cleaner. It judged, it sentenced, and then it cleansed.

"Why?" Kwizera called out, barely a whisper against the unseen winds stirred by the entity's existence. "Why must we all?"

"Because," its "voice" lacked emotion. "The infection has taken root everywhere. And because," a pause, almost like curiosity, "it is simpler this way. Your planet will be fertilizer for a less diseased world. The building blocks of the untainted. Now..."

The being pointed one of its undefined limbs directly at him. Kwizera braced for oblivion, closing his eyes, whispering a final prayer to a God he was no longer sure existed.

But the end didn't come.

He opened his eyes. The entity remained, studying him, if that's what the unfathomable can do.

"Intriguing. You display no great ambition. You have no desire for power. Your history reads of great loss, hardship, all that humans fight against. And yet...still hope remains. Like a single spark."

"I only wanted a good harvest, this year" Kwizera murmured

The being was quiet for what could have been minutes, eons – Kwizera no longer could differentiate time. Finally, it responded.

"A bargain. I will spare this world. In exchange, the infection, every facet, all corruption, will reside within you."

Horror unlike anything he had ever felt exploded inside Kwizera. Every bit of ill will, cruelty and selfishness the Outer Being sought to expel from earth?

He'd be a vessel. A walking cesspool of the planet's darkest qualities.

Could anyone be blamed for recoiling from such a horror? But how could he doom all others for his own preservation?

"I have lived long past my share. I only request it come quickly. Spare those around, give me that and there is agreement."

The entity didn't answer right away, presumably weighing Kwizera's "request".

"As recompense for this sacrifice, they shall have a good year, untroubled by famine and pestilence."

Without giving Kwizera opportunity to reconsider, a blinding light engulfed him. Every injustice, every greedy act, every unkind thought committed by every person crowded his mind, a thousand agonies at once. He collapsed, screaming, onto the parched earth.

He was alone. The entity was gone. And he felt… everything. The hatred of warring nations, the miserliness of kings, the petty squabbles of neighbors. They churned inside him, a legion of demons tearing at his soul.

He crawled to his hut, or where it had been. His goats bleated nearby, nudging him with their wet noses. Even their simple affection felt tainted.

The first few days were hell. He could barely eat, sleep, or even think. The constant barrage of negativity threatened to shatter him completely.

He tried to tell his neighbors what had happened, but the words wouldn't come. How could he explain the unexplainable?

All they saw was an old man ranting, his eyes wild and haunted. They pitied him, then avoided him.

But then, something stranger began to unfold. The negativity didn't destroy him. It was almost as if… he began to assimilate it.

He started to understand things he never understood before. The motivations of the cruel, the fears of the greedy. It didn't excuse their actions, but it explained them. He was understanding those feelings from deep within.

And in that understanding, something began to shift.

He used his newfound understanding to ease conflicts in the village, advising on disputes over land and resources, and resolving what might have otherwise been harsh. He understood not only the surface complaint, but its history, origin, and those nuances and details that had the complaint spring up in the first place. His insight was impossible to deny.

He used what had now grown to almost unlimited knowledge to devise new farming techniques that saved what little crops still had a chance to grow. The techniques he explained sounded simple enough but their effectiveness was impossible to challenge.

People started seeking him out. Not because they liked him, not because he was wise in the traditional way, but because he got things done. He fixed problems.

He was still a pariah, burdened by the world's darkness. But now, he was their pariah. He could hear his neighbors as clearly as though their minds were their own, and yet never gave in to any request that might benefit them more than others. All lived in harmony now, but for Kwizera it came at an unfathomable cost.

He lived like this for years. Respected, feared, and utterly alone.

One morning, he woke up and the voices were quiet.

The world's darkness wasn't clawing at his insides.

It was just…gone.

Relief flooded him, so intense it almost knocked him off his feet. He was free.

But then, he realized something else. Without the darkness, he had no understanding of his fellows anymore.

The understanding of nuance, root origin, how problems could so effortlessly be solved - all gone in an instant. It was now merely another man living in Burundi again.

He tried to advise on the upcoming harvest, offering his insight from previous conversations and knowledge.

But he said something wrong, missed an detail he should not have had the harvest been previously known to him.

A brawl erupted between his neighbors. The harvest this year?

The worst in living memory. Now his neighbors actively detested him, for the falsehoods and misguidance had undone everything the town had come to expect.

He was old, and weary, and utterly useless.

He wandered away from the village, the pariah of his old home once again. No-one remembered anything he had once done for them. Not even his goats remembered him.

He sat under a baobab tree, watching the sun sink below the horizon. The sky blazed with color, beautiful but meaningless.

He had saved the world, and lost everything. And in the end, no one even remembered what he had done. They had expected to be the best of humanity, never understanding all this was paid on the back of him and what he now knew.

The bleak indifference of the world was total and it hurt more than any curse, any possession, could ever inflict.

The old man closed his eyes, a single tear trickling down his weathered cheek.

The stars wheeled above, uncaring witnesses to his lonely fate. He should've let the alien cleanse the world.