I swing.
The cedar explodes. Not cracks. Not splits. Explodes. Splinters spray across both lawns like confetti, sharp little fragments of perfect grain and marine-grade polyurethane catching the last of the sunset, and the sound is enormous, a deep wooden CRACK that echoes off the houses and silences thetrombone solo for exactly one heartbeat before someone on the street whoops.
Plank two.
I don't pause. The hammer comes back over my shoulder and the weight of it sings through my arms and my hips rotate the way they did when I was seventeen and swinging a maul into siege gates in the Ashfeld campaigns, and the second plank disintegrates into a shower of pale wood fiber that drifts across Junia's mud-caked flower beds like snow.
Three. Four. Five.
Each swing tears something open inside me that I didn't know was sealed shut. Every plank I bolted into this fence was a promise I made to myself after the warbands. No more disorder. No more unpredictability. No more waking up in the dark unsure if the person beside you would still be alive by morning. Build the wall. Maintain the wall. The wall is safety. The wall is control.
Six. Seven.
The crossbeams give. A whole section folds inward, and I drive the hammer through it like a battering ram, splitting the horizontal supports into kindling. My shoulders burn. My shirt is soaked through with sweat and golem mud and something that might be beetle guts from two days ago that I somehow missed in the wash. I don't care.
I don't care.
That's the part that cracks me wider than the cedar.
Eight. Nine. Ten.
I'm roaring now. Not words. Just sound. The deep, chest-rattling bellow that my people use when we mean something too big for language. The dwarf contractors answer with a drinking chant. Someone bangs a spatula against the keg. The whole street picks up the rhythm, pounding and stomping andhollering, and the fence keeps shattering under my hammer in perfect time.
Twenty. Twenty-five.
Splinters in my forearms. Don't care. Blood mixed with sap on my knuckles. Don't care. A long sliver of cedar catches my jaw and draws a thin line of green across my skin. Don't. Care.
Thirty.
Thirty-five.
Forty.
I'm breathing like a forge bellows. The hammer head is dented. Both backyards are carpeted in destroyed wood, a battlefield of precision engineering reduced to mulch, and the final property border between 4712 and 4714 Cedarbrook Estates no longer exists.
Her lawn bleeds into mine. Wild clover creeping across the border into my Kentucky bluegrass. A rogue vine from the apology plant she threw over the fence two weeks ago already snaking through the wreckage. My geometric gravel path ends abruptly at a riot of purple wildflowers that have no business sprouting overnight but are growing anyway because Junia's magic doesn't give a damn about timelines.
I plant the hammer head in the dirt. Lean on the handle.
Forty-seven planks. Gone. Every one.
The crowd is screaming. The keg is fountaining because someone kicked it during the stomping. Mrs. Patterson has her lobster-claw mitts raised above her head like she just witnessed a knockout.
I don't look at any of them.
I look at her.
Junia stands on her side of the property line. Mud on her boots. Bug guts on her collar. Hair wild from the golem fight, from the greenhouse break-in, from the two weeks of absolute catastrophe that started the morning she dropped a bag offertilizer on my boots. Her eyes are wide and wet and her mouth is open and she's gripping a red plastic cup so hard the sides have buckled inward.
I step over the debris. Wood crunches under my boots. One stride. Two. The property border disappears beneath my feet and it means nothing, it's just dirt, it was always just dirt, and I was the fool who built a fortress on top of it and called it peace.
Three strides. Four.
I stop in front of her. Close enough to see the pulse jumping in her throat. Close enough to smell her, green things and rain and that cheap vanilla shampoo that has no business smelling that good.
"No more fence."
She looks up at me. Way up. The cup creaks in her fist.
