"Concerto for Wartime" + "If a Discarded God Can Change, So Can I"

“If a discarded god can change, so can I,” the narrator thinks, standing before a crashed, snow-covered serpent god she helped build. She had been a mechanic on the project, a tribute offered up by a lover who then abandoned her on a dying planet. Now, decades later, she has returned to the wreck, and she begins to repair it.

This episode of the Lightspeed Magazine podcast presents two short stories, “Concerto for Wartime” by Sean Williams and “If a Discarded God Can Change, So Can I” by V. M. Ayala. Though different in setting and scale, both stories explore the same core tension: the relationship between an individual’s internal life and the vast, impersonal forces of war, betrayal, and collapse. Each protagonist is a maker—a magician and a mechanic—whose craft is entangled with loss and regret. The throughline is about what it means to keep working, to keep creating, when the world you built for has already broken.

The Magician’s Concentration