The House of Mist: The Cursed Commodity: Book I
A cursed Roman fish-sauce factory. A haunted valley outside Antioch. Two brothers with nothing left to lose.
In 64 BCE, disgraced veteran Gaius and his bookish younger brother Marcus flee a burned farm in the Taurus foothills and chase a final chance at survival: a ruined garum villa on the marshy fringes of Antioch, the new "Queen of the East." On parchment, the Domus Caligo is a gold mine, perfectly placed to feed Rome's insatiable hunger for luxury fish sauce along the Silk Road. In reality, it's a house that villages feed with offerings so it stays asleep, a factory full of rotten vats and black sludge that refuses to behave like normal salt and fish.
As Gaius tries to beat the property back into something Roman fixing walls, scouring vats, plotting contracts with Antioch's merchants Marcus begins to hear things under the stone: a child's knock beneath the mosaic, wet breathing behind sealed doors, and the impossible testimony of a feral boy who seems to live inside the heating tunnels and remember a previous family that never escaped. The more they fight to restart production, the more the house "corrects" their efforts, twisting brine into poison and turning profit into a ritual that demands its own sacrifices.
The House of Mist blends visceral Roman history with slow-burn gothic horror: tax farmers and Silk Road caravans, Pompey's redrawn maps and street-lit Antioch, set against living architecture that remembers every crime committed within its walls. It's a story about brothers, debt, and ambition in a world where recipes can be curses, wells can be doors, and a "better life in the East" might mean becoming the next ingredient in the sauce everyone is desperate to taste.
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