What is "4E," anyway?

Quick vocabulary lesson for anyone curious about the world of Relics of the Fallen.

Cedar Sanderson created all the imagery in Relics of the Fallen!

Every artifact Wormwood recovers gets referred to as “4E.” This is shorthand nobody in the program can fully explain anymore, ordnance and objects of totally unknown origin that violate known physics. Nobody knows who made them. Nobody knows why they’re scattered across Earth like archaeological debris from a war nobody remembers fighting.

The field techs sort them informally by “civilization.” Civ A (”Smooth”), Civ B (”Block”), Civ D (”Pipe”). These are not based on any real historical fact but on surface features or design characteristics, because that’s the only classification system that actually works when you have zero other data. It’s exactly the kind of dark-humored, ad-hoc naming convention that real EOD and intel units actually use for things they don’t understand or have not yet classified. (I know. I used to be one of those techs.) There are several different categorization schemes in the Wormwood organization, but these are the ones that have stuck.

Some of these things sing to each other. Some of them are weapons designed to end a planet. One of the most unsettling scenes I wrote takes place in a place the team calls “the Nursery.” Walk through it yourself and you’ll understand why.

World-building like this is my favorite part of the job — creating something that feels half-archaeology, half-nightmare, and all lived-in.

You can get Relics of the Fallen here.