Three colossal stone faces pierce the obsidian waters of the Underdark sea, their weathered features frozen in eternal screams. These ancient windmills, carved by hands long forgotten, stand like silent sentinels guarding the hidden approaches to the port city of Sloopdilmonpolop. Their massive stone teeth form perfect circles in each gaping maw, spinning endlessly in the perpetual gloom.

Beneath each windmill's screaming visage, the dark waters spiral into hungry vortexes. The mills groan as they turn, their sound a low dirge that echoes across the cavern's vast expanse. Phosphorescent fungi cling to the worn stone, casting an eerie blue glow that dances across the churning waters below.

Sailors whisper tales of the two false passages—of ships drawn into grinding teeth of stone, of crews pulled into bottomless depths where the pressure crushes hull and bone alike. These are the Liar's Mills, they say, for only one mouth leads to safe harbor. The others feed on the foolish and the falsely informed, their waters stained with centuries of failed attempts.

The true path is a secret passed between trusted captains in sealed messages and whispered words. Even then, approaching the correct mill requires steady nerves and steadier hands. The whirlpool pulls vessels through a twisting underwater tunnel, where the darkness is absolute and the roar of rushing water drowns out all thought. Those who emerge on the other side find themselves in the hidden harbor of just outside the Mutton knife, their ships guided by the same current that claimed so many others.

Local fisherfolk say that on particularly quiet nights, when the mills turn slower than usual, you can hear more than just the grinding of stone against stone. They swear the screaming faces sing—a chorus of three voices calling out to passing ships, each claiming to be the true path home. But as every sailor and trader worth their salt in the Holy city of lakes learns early on, in the Underdark, trust is a currency more precious than gold, and lies have teeth that grind just as surely as the mills themselves.

The Luminus Vermis

Deep beneath the surface, where the weight of a billion years of earth presses down on ancient stone, there exists a creature that defies nature's fundamental choices. The Luminus Vermis, as the deep-dwelling scholars named it, stands as living proof that evolution sometimes refuses to pick a side.

In the sprawling cavern housing the dim-lit city of Sloopdilmonpolop, the creature's massive form winds through the rock like a tangled root system grown wild. Its flesh—if one can call it that—pulses with an ethereal blue luminescence that bathes the underground metropolis in perpetual twilight. The light ebbs and flows with the creature's feeding cycles, creating a natural day-night rhythm that the city's inhabitants have built their lives around.

Every few days, the Vermis sends its offspring—translucent tendrils as thick as tree trunks—up through the maze of fissures and cracks in the cavern ceiling. These photophagic progeny pierce the surface world like ghostly fingers reaching for the sky, unfurling delicate light-catching membranes that shimmer like liquid glass in the sunlight. For precious hours, they drink in the sun's energy, their tissues swelling with captured light.

When the young return, they don't seek independence like most offspring in nature. Instead, they make their way back to their colossal parent, where they're absorbed back into its mass—a sacrifice that feeds the ancient being's dual hunger for both flesh and photonic energy. The consumed light transforms within the creature's bio-luminescent organs, creating the steady blue glow that has sustained Sloopdilmonpolop for generations.

Some of the city's oldest records suggest that the Vermis predates their civilization by eons, a relic from when life first grappled with the choice between autotroph and heterotroph. But rather than choose, it became both—and more. Its vast network of photosynthetic flesh and predatory organs spans miles of underground passages, creating a biological infrastructure that makes life possible in the lightless deep.

The scholars of Sloopdilmonpolop have a saying: "In the Vermis, we see nature's indecision made perfect." For in its refusal to choose between plant and animal, it became the cornerstone of their world, a living bridge between the sunlit surface and the eternal dark.