The Salt Mine of Blackthroat

The mine shaft of Zwartkeel carries you deeper into the silence, and the salt glitters like frost on the walls in the light of your lanterns. There is no sound here but your own breathing and the crunch of crystal beneath your boots. The salt swallows every sound, and the miners whisper that it keeps every scream too, somewhere deep in the veins, ready to give them back at the worst possible moment.

For generations the mine was the pride of the village, until three weeks ago the deepest crew struck something in a sealed vein older than the mine itself. Since then no one has returned from the lowest tunnels. Something has woken down there, a creature that thrives in the eternal silence, that hunts sound and movement, and that unfailingly finds any intruder who makes a noise.

You descend with hushed voices and held breath, because here silence is survival. You navigate by signs and by touch through salt tunnels that scatter the light, decipher the scratched messages of the vanished crew, and solve puzzles of silence and movement: a door that opens only in total stillness, a bridge that collapses at the slightest sound. One careless step, one scream, and the thing knows exactly where you are.

In the sealed vein dwells De Stiltevreter, a groping, eyeless figure that turns toward every breath and mimics the swallowed screams of the dead to lure you in. To make it out alive you must catch De Stiltevreter in its own weapon, turning the silence against it, or seal the vein again before it finds the way up. The climax plays out in the echoless depths, in pitch black, where you must fight without making a peep, against something that hears you breathe.