This flash of fiction is for Sue Vincent’s photo prompt. Why not visit her site and have a go yourself?

The stories spoke of this place, a wicked world engulfed by the ocean. For aeons it had lain beneath the waves, a turbulent, capricious sea that boiled and tossed within the rim of the horizon. The coast was deserted. No fishing boats ever cast off from this shore to risk the strange and treacherous sea that muttered low and evil on calm days and howled with the voices of the damned in a gale.

Now the ocean has retreated and left behind squat, algae-covered ruins, bare trees, black and dead to the core, and the deep brown sludge of a thousand years of decomposed human refuse. The rumours say that vengeance walks the slime among the dead things though no one has dared venture beyond the sheltering forest to…