In the Chilseong district of Daegu's northern ward, there stood an old annex building — and within it, a disused observatory that had been sealed for longer than anyone could clearly remember. The locals called the area around it the Curse of the Red Star, and they kept their distance. The observatory had once been known as a place of serious astronomical work, but one night a star appeared in the sky above it, and after that, nothing was ever quite the same.
That night, the astronomers inside detected a frequency they could not account for. There in the sky they had spent their careers studying, a red star hung where no red star had any right to be — something that had surfaced, it seemed, from the very bottom of the dark. It appeared in no catalogue, in no record anywhere in the world. From the moment they trained their instruments on it, the astronomers began to suffer strange dreams. In those dreams, all of Daegu was swallowed by a vast red fog, and from somewhere beneath the ground came whispering — low, terrible, and without end.
Within days, strange things began to happen in the streets surrounding the observatory. At the edge of dawn, a red mist would settle over the roads, and within it, shapes like figures would drift close to people and murmur to them. The words were in no language anyone could name, yet those who heard them came away with a fear they could neither explain nor shake.
When the observatory doors were opened again, there was no one inside. What remained instead were strange symbols carved into the walls, and drawn across every surface, the configurations of constellations that belonged to no known sky. The police conducted a thorough investigation and found nothing — no physical evidence of any kind. The residents began calling it the influence of the red star, and not one of them set foot in that building again.
Even now, people say the red star appears sometimes in the night sky above Daegu. Those who have seen it find themselves gripped by a dread so complete that they cannot put it into words. Perhaps the star is not simply a celestial body at all — perhaps it is a warning that something beyond the reach of human imagination is watching us from the other side of everything we know. And whatever that something is, it has not forgotten the quiet nights of Daegu, and it never will.
