Another fairy-tale-type story. This one might be an analogy for climate change here on Earth? I dunno.

This one feels pretty general and vague. Perhaps if I knew what this was an analogy for, then I'd be able to follow it, but I don't understand what the sun means or the branches mean. And since that's all this story really is, that's all I really have to say about it.

Also, was there prompt relevance in this one? I don't dock stories for it, personally, but sometimes I wonder.

If you want to do a story-based allegory, the overlying story needs to make some amount of sense before the allegory is taken into account. I suspect I might understand this story. However, at present it is a very murky allegory riddled with logical contradictions that make it difficult to parse.

The physical nature of the tree and the culture of the creatures are the two most important story elements, and they are presented with numerous inconsistencies. The bark is labeled "invincible", yet the creatures carve into it, and the entire branch (which is presumably composed of invincible bark) is imperiled by the wind. The creatures' beliefs vary widely throughout the story in unpredictable ways. Despite hating the wind (which means they recognize it threatens the branch), they initially believe in the branch's ability to overcome the wind, and they further believe that their belief itself sustains the branch; they also initially believe that this is the only thing needed to sustain the branch. Then they believe the tree is dying, but they lie to themselves about it. Yet immediately after this, they obviously admit it to themselves because they develop strategies to help save the branch. This also suggests they no longer believe that belief is sufficient to sustain the branch. They are said to feel obligated to help the tree, even though this should be superseded by the fact that they depend upon it for their very survival. There is a nice hint of tension between the health of the tree and the survival of the branch at the expense of other branches, but that fails to develop further.

The beliefs (and strategies) of the creatures change over time, but there is no reason provided for these paradigmatic shifts. We don't know how they arrived at any of the conclusions they did, because we are force-fed their beliefs directly with no information about why they believe any of these things. Worse still, the beliefs are contradicted by events in the story (the tree kept growing and didn't die or show any signs of dying, the branch broke off despite the creatures' belief in it), so the reader can't even trust what the creatures believe. Since the beliefs of the creatures are essentially the narrator's voice, the entire story becomes unreliable.

This is a fixable story, but you need to provide more than a bare-bones allegory to make it work. You need to make the story make sense in a way where the reader understands why the creatures believe and act as they do, preferably by painting a picture that allows the reader to figure that out on their own. Currently the story is an inconsistent and confusing mythos with strong themes that aren't well-developed.

For those interested, my best guess is that this story is an allegory to the phylogenetic web, where the creatures represent chains of descendants of species. The branch falling would be a mass extinction event, although an entire branch falling shouldn't happen from competition alone, so that part of the allegory doesn't hold well. It's also a difficult allegory because the "tree" shape of the web stems from the fact that it is a historical record of species. At any given point in time, the species on the Earth don't resemble a tree, but just the very tips of the branches that survived. So time passing in the mythos doesn't quite match up with what the tree is supposed to represent.

I don't get this one either. The writing seems good to me, but even the best writing in the world can fall apart when the meaning is entirely lost.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to be an allegory for either, though Front and Trick's guesses don't feel right to me. I got caught up on the tree being described as "cosmic," so my best guess is that the branch was supposed to be an intergalactic civilization of some sort. But I'm not really sure how that fits in with the allegory, so I'm probably way off.

I really like the imagery in this one, though I reckon that's down to personal taste. I don't know whether it's supposed to be an allegory, but I don't care. I like pieces of writing that leave me free to make my own interpretation, which this does.

This does mean that I agree with some of the previous reviewers in saying that it's only the bare bones of a story. For me, it's more of a stepping stone towards new ideas of my own. And as I said before, I really like that sort of thing.

A lot of what I'm going to say is going to be very similar to what I've said here: >>Bachiavellian.

Things just feel a bit too vague to really leave an emotional impact. By not having any real characters or giving any concrete description of the tree, the creatures, or the setting in general, you make the story read like an allegory. In that, it doesn't quite hit the mark, because allegories need to have clear relationships between all of the details and the concept for which the story is trying to be a metaphor.

Things feel really wishy-washy, like, for instance, how you describe the tree as vibrant and ever-growing, but then the story says that it's dying. And this really doesn't seem to have any sort of real meaning or impact to the story. Even after the creatures' branch breaks, the tree still grows. The "source" still shines. In fact, the whole point of the ending seems to be about how the tree and its residents are impassive towards the creatures' deaths. This seems to contract the whole "tree is dying" idea.

In the end, the general vagueness of the piece is what brought it down for me.