Here is the expanded version:
Part I: The Sky Opens
The air was a blade. Shaman Seo-yun knelt beneath the old zelkova tree, its gnarled branches, usually laden with green, now skeletal against the unforgiving heavens. The ground beneath her bare feet was not merely cold; it was frozen, iron-hard, each sharp pebble a needle pressing into her flesh. In her left hand, her ritual drum, its deer-skin head stretched taut, seemed to vibrate with a suppressed energy. Her head was tilted back, her eyes fixed on the distant, glittering expanse of stars, points of cold, indifferent light in the black velvet void. Tonight, she called to Hwanung, the divine son of the sky god Hwanin—the benevolent ruler who had descended long ago from the celestial realm to shape Korea's verdant mountains and winding rivers, to bestow upon humanity the gifts of laws, wisdom, and the blessings of cultivation.
But that benevolence felt like a forgotten dream, a faded myth in Seo-yun's village. Life here was a slow, agonizing decay. The crops, once lush fields of vibrant green, had failed for the third season in a row, their withered stalks brittle as ancient bones. The rice paddies were cracked basins of dust, the earth a starving mouth. The life-giving rains, Hwanung's promised blessing, had ceased, leaving the very air thin and parched, tasting of despair. And the sky, once Hwanung's benevolent domain, remained vast, cold, and achingly distant, a canvas of unfeeling brilliance. The villagers, their faces etched with famine and fear, had dwindled in number, their hope a dying ember. Seo-yun, the village shaman, their last desperate link to the divine, carried the weight of their suffering in every beat of her heart.
So she beat the drum harder. The rhythm began as a solemn plea, a gentle pulse, then intensified, quickening into a frantic, pounding supplication. Her hands, raw and aching, blurred over the drumhead, each strike a desperate prayer, a demand. She swayed, a lone, stark silhouette against the starlight, her long, dark hair whipping around her face. She sang, her voice raw, scraped thin by the dry air and her escalating desperation, a desperate cry for intervention. It was an ancient chant, a resonant echo of countless shamans before her, a plea for the divine to remember its earthly children.
"Come down, come down, come down—" Her voice climbed, a fragile thread woven into the insistent drumbeat, reaching higher and higher, piercing the vast silence of the night. Her feet, bare and bruised, stamped a frenzied rhythm on the frozen soil, not feeling the cold, only the burning need to connect, to summon, to compel. Sweat, cold and clammy, beaded on her brow despite the biting chill. Her eyes remained locked on the constellations, each star a pinprick of mocking light.
The stars shimmered. It was not a gentle twinkling, but an unnatural rippling, as if the fabric of the heavens itself was distending, stretching under an immense, unseen pressure. The air grew heavy, thick with an electric hum, a premonition of cosmic upheaval. The wind, which had been a steady, mournful sigh, began to twist, spiraling into violent, localized eddies that tore at her robes and whipped dust into stinging clouds. The zelkova tree, once a sturdy sentinel, groaned, its branches swaying as if in silent agony.
And the sky—split.
It wasn't a crack of thunder, nor a blinding flash of divine light. It was a slow, deliberate tearing, a rending of the cosmic veil. A seam, impossibly vast, began to open between the familiar patterns of the constellations. Not with light, but with an absence of light, a blacker-than-black void that seemed to suck in the surrounding starlight. It was a void that swallowed the very concept of emptiness, giving way to something far, far worse.
But what emerged from this cosmic fissure was not light. It was not rain. It was, instead, teeth.
White. Glistening. Serrated. They emerged from the seams of the constellations, pushing through the rending fabric of the heavens with a sickening slowness. They were monstrous, impossibly large, curved like the tusks of primordial beasts, yet sharp as freshly honed blades. They lined the black, expanding maw between the stars, forming a horrifying, predatory smile that stretched wider than the world, encompassing the entire dome of the night sky. Each tooth was distinct, yet connected, forming an organic, terrifying structure that pulsed with an unseen life. The air grew thick with a metallic tang, the faint scent of ozone and something else, something utterly alien and terrifying, like the breath of an infinite predator.
Seo-yun froze, her drum falling from her numb fingers to land with a dull thud on the frozen earth. Her mouth hung open, a silent scream caught in her throat, her breath hitching, refusing to come. Her eyes, wide and horrified, reflected the impossibly vast, toothed maw. She had called for the heavens. She had not imagined they would bite. This was not the benevolent Hwanung of legend, the bringer of civilization and crops. This was something else. Something primal. Something hungry. And it had answered.
Part II: Celestial Wrath
The teeth lowered—not with a sudden, violent descent, but with a horrifying, inexorable slowness. They ground through the few wisps of clouds that had dared to drift into the night sky, pulverizing them into shimmering motes that vanished in the growing darkness. The sound was not deafening; it was a low, resonant grinding, like colossal millstones turning, slow and purposeful, eroding the very fabric of existence. It was the sound of immense, unfeeling power, a sound that vibrated not in Seo-yun's ears, but deep in her very bones, threatening to shatter them.
From the wind, which had now become a swirling vortex of invisible force, came a voice. It was not a single voice, but vast and layered, a chorus of infinite whispers and thundering pronouncements, simultaneously ancient and impossibly young. It resonated not through the air, but through Seo-yun's very soul, bypassing her ears entirely, directly implanting itself in her consciousness.
"You call for favor, daughter of dust," the voice boomed, yet it was also a whisper, intimately close. "You beg for the bounty of the sky, for sustenance, for life. But you carry rot. You carry the sickness of your kind. The greed. The division. The disrespect for the balance. Your fields are barren not for lack of rain, but for the sickness in your hearts. Your prayers are tainted."
Seo-yun dropped her drum, her trembling hands suddenly useless. It clattered against the frozen ground, its last faint resonance swallowed by the escalating horror. She fell to her knees, not by choice, but because her legs simply gave out, unable to support the immense terror that had gripped her. Her body shook uncontrollably, a fragile leaf in a cosmic storm.
Her skin tightened. It was not from the cold, though the air had grown frigid, sharp as splinters of ice. It was from a pulling sensation, an invisible, inexorable force that seemed to hook beneath her flesh, drawing it taut, stretching it. She felt as if countless unseen strings, finer than spider silk yet stronger than steel, were pulling at every pore, every follicle, lifting her from the ground. Her muscles strained, screaming in silent protest, but there was no resisting the upward tug. The very air around her thickened, congealing into a viscous medium that twisted gravity itself, distorting space around her, pulling her towards the monstrous maw above. She screamed—a sound of pure, unadulterated agony and terror—but the sound that tore from her throat came out as a brittle, horrifying hiss, thin and reedy, like the sound of dry leaves skittering across cracked stone. Her jaw was locked, forced open by an invisible vise. Her ribs strained, pushed outward by an internal pressure, as if her lungs were swelling to immense proportions.
Above, the teeth yawned wider, stretching across the entire zenith, consuming the last vestiges of starlight. Between them, there was no tongue, no throat, no soft palate of a normal mouth. Only a terrifying, lightless hunger, a vast, abyssal darkness that promised ultimate consumption. It was a void that seemed to extend into nothingness, yet paradoxically, it felt intensely present, a hungry maw waiting to swallow all of creation.
Then, from her shoulders, hands broke forth. Not her hands, not extensions of her own flesh, but monstrous, clawed appendages that pushed outward from beneath her skin, tearing through muscle and sinew with sickening wet sounds. They were colossal, ancient, made of pale, luminous bone and taut, leathery flesh, resembling nothing human. They were Hwanung's, not the compassionate hands that offered wisdom, but the hands of divine judgment, the instruments of celestial wrath. They grew swiftly, disproportionately large, already forming, already moving with a terrible purpose. With agonizing slowness, these newly manifested hands clutched her own face, their immense strength prying open her already screaming mouth, stretching her jaw to its breaking point. It was a forced offering, a brutal preparation for consumption.
The sky leaned lower. The grinding sound intensified, filling the world. The metallic tang of ozone became overpowering, tasting of blood and electricity.
The first tooth, an immense, crystalline shard, grazed her crown. It didn't tear violently; it sliced with an unimaginable precision, a cold, surgical cut that seemed to defy physical pain, replacing it with a horrifying, expanding sensation of severance. It sliced through her hair, through her scalp, through the bone of her skull. She felt her mind splinter, not in the chaos of death, but in a horrifyingly orderly fashion. It was not mercy; it was a harvesting. Her thoughts, her memories, her very consciousness, were being meticulously peeled away, absorbed into the immense, alien intelligence that resided within the maw. She was being disassembled, piece by piece, both physically and spiritually.
"The heavens descend not for prayers, but for balance," the voice whispered, colder and more resonant now, imbued with a chilling finality. "Life demands death. Creation demands destruction. And imbalance demands correction."
Seo-yun's body rose, no longer pulled by invisible strings, but lifted directly by the unseen jaws. It was not grace; it was the slow, deliberate movement of a predator seizing its prey. Her drum, lying shattered on the frozen ground below, cracked further, its last vestiges of a human plea silenced. Her tattered robes fluttered wildly in the intensifying, unnatural wind, catching on the jagged edges of the rising teeth. And then, with a final, echoing hiss that was both her last breath and the sky's hungry sigh, she disappeared between the teeth, swallowed whole by the celestial maw.
When dawn came, painting the eastern sky with a pale, bruised light, the villagers emerged from their huts, their faces gaunt with another night of hunger and cold. They found only her drum, half-buried in the churned, frozen earth, a few splintered fragments scattered around it, and the faint, vanishing imprints of where she had danced, a testament to her desperate, futile ritual. There was no other trace.
And overhead, as the first rays of the rising sun touched the horizon, the stars shone strangely sharp—not soft, twinkling points of light, but hard, glittering pinpricks, arranged in unfamiliar, unsettling patterns. It was as if the sky, now cleansed of its human "rot," still smiled with too many teeth, their cold, celestial brilliance a silent, terrible reminder of Hwanung's uncompromising judgment. The villagers looked up, a cold dread seeping into their hearts, an unspoken understanding of the terrible price of imbalance.