There is sound and there is noise and this hovers at the brink, their voices still a distinct thunder, not yet the overwhelming flood of full migration. By midmorning she’ll need her headset, earplugs, earmuffs, and other layered defenses against her prey, but for now she can just watch them pass unprotected.

There are few worlds that allow the luxury of size, most life is more akin to mice than elephants, but on the world they haven’t gotten around to naming, life started with elephant and worked up.

Only the outliers of the herd are up and moving with the sun, the core is still asleep, blanketing the grasslands in a patchwork of black and tan hide. It still takes her a bit each time she sees them to wrap her mind around the fact that the herd literally goes on to the horizon. They’ll strip the ground bare by the time the last of them passes, but less than a day after that everything is green again. No ecosystem should be able to support such overabundance, even temporarily, and the cycle of feast and famine seems too delicately balanced for her comfort. But this is Big World and they’ve just started digging into all it’s quirks and biological oddities.