Covenant

The Covenant, or the Covenant Empire, was a religious multi-species hegemony and the predominant power in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy for approximately 3,400 years. Born out of a pact between the San'Shyuum and the Sangheili that ended a devastating religious war between the two species, the Covenant expanded over the following millennia to incorporate six other major species: the Lekgolo, Unggoy, Huragok, Yanme'e, Kig-Yar, and the Jiralhanae, along with several others in a tributary or fringe status.

The Covenant was built around a religion that deified the long-vanished Forerunners and the technological relics they had left behind. The ultimate goal of the hegemony was to discover and use these relics, most prominently the "Sacred Rings" of the Halo Array, to follow in the Forerunners' footsteps and ascend into godhood in a process known as the Great Journey. This was seen as not only a manner of afterlife, but also a way for the overall Covenant meta-civilization to escape the inevitable end of the universe. This religion permeated every aspect of Covenant society, and was most prominently used to enforce a rigid system of techno-feudalism in which religious, political and technocratic power were inextricably linked and, on the highest level, largely at the hands of the San'Shyuum Prophets.

Following a disastrous first contact at the human colony world of Harvest in 2525 sparked by the then-nascent Hierarch triumvirate perceiving the new species as a threat to the Covenant religion and their own power, the Covenant began a war of extermination against humanity. Although the Covenant vastly surpassed their enemies numerically and technologically, the unexpected prolongation of the war also drove the Covenant into a death spiral, exacerbating various socio-political tensions and divisions to the breaking point. This culminated in the Great Schism, in which the Hierarchs ruled to remove the Sangheili as the Covenant's primary military caste, and elevate the Jiralhanae in their stead. Coinciding with other momentous events such as the discovery of two Halo rings and the release of the Flood, this not only drove much of the Covenant into a violent civil war but also saw the shattering of its religious unity, eradicating the ironclad legitimacy of its Prophet rulers which had held the hegemony together for millennia. What began as a conflict between the broadly-defined Schismatic and Loyalist factions quickly devolved into one between numerous groups and movements.

However monolithic it may have appeared at first glance, the Covenant was notoriously complex, encompassing numerous disparate political, religious and military organizations. While diverse in their methods and at times contentious between one another, all these organizations were united in their pursuit of the Great Journey, and all ultimately answered to the High Council and the Hierarchs.

Governed from the mobile station High Charity, the Covenant's holy city, the Covenant's dominion encompassed thousands of worlds. Rather than inhabiting planets, sizable portions of the empire were also mobile, making their home on starships or mobile habitats.