Savage and cruel.

The world is savagely pure tonight. Velvet sky, no clouds. The moon has lain down a milky walkway across the lake from where it's hanging, and underneath its influence the villages scattered around the plain are asleep, or at least the people who live in them are; the villages themselves are inanimate therefore are never either asleep or awake, they just ..... are.

Hyenas skulk around the huts scavenging for anything that might be remotely edible. The ground is always swept clean - snakes don't like to attempt to travel across ground devoid of cover of some sort and it falls to little girls to keep the village well swept.

Snakes, hyenas, little girls and the moon, but no sounds.