When 11-year-old Mikkel Nielsen disappears in the small German town of Winden, his father Ulrich, a local police officer, is ready to turn the whole district upside down in an effort to find his child. Strange sounds keep coming from the cave where the boy was last seen, and later a locked door with the inscription "So the world was created" is discovered inside. Mikkel's disappearance will push the characters to uncover frightening secrets of their hometown, closely intertwined with its past.