Redeemer

Sangheili Redeemers are a martial order of specialized chaplains, cultural officers and enforcers charged with investigating all cultural transgressions in the Covenant's Sangheili population and sometimes non-Sangheili faithless. Originally an independent order, the Redeemers were organized under the Ministry of Integrity in the Covenant's later centuries following the Second Illumination.

Description
A very particular class of chaplain-enforcers, Redeemers' responsibilities involve upholding the Sangheili's institutionalized honor code and system of morality. Redeemers primarily act as judges and executioners of their field, personally carrying out sentences against each infringing individual. Each individual is ultimately responsible for their own personal honor and dignity, but an offending individual can also tarnish the honor of his peer group, such as a family or military order. Redeemers fulfill a particular but necessary niche in Sangheili culture, ensuring that maverick individuals do not exploit and therefore render meaningless the species' pervasive code of honor. At the same time, since honor is fundamentally an internalized concept rather than a strict law enforced from above, Redeemers' activities are not highly public and largely focus on major infractions that also have legal dimensions.

Their authority supersedes most other policing units, only limited by the administrating bureaucrats of the Ministry of Integrity and the higher governors and Councilors. While they maintain an extensive understanding of Covenant law and knowledge of religious practices, these are considered secondary concerns to them. Unlike most of their peers, their jurisdiction also extends to operatives in the field. If a warrior (usually a high-ranking one) is captured by the enemy, a Redeemer is expected to track him down and eliminate him. This is not strictly to salvage the captured warrior's honor, but to preserve the honor of his unit and to silence him, for those unable or unwilling to follow through with their own suicide are also regarded as untrustworthy and more likely to betray secrets to the enemy.

All Covenant fleets and legions are generally granted a small detachment of roving Redeemers for the purposes of both enforcing the basic tenets of honor and acting as cultural advisors. As chaplains, Redeemers also fulfill various duties as advisers and arbitrators within the units they visit or are assigned to; in this capacity they act as morale officers of sorts. For instance, warriors may come to their units Redeemer for religious counseling or some approximation of a confession — e.g. if a warrior suspects he has acted dishonorably in some way or is conflicted on some particular issue, he may confide in a Redeemer who will then honestly advise him on how to correct his behavior; since the Redeemer is under vows of silence, he can be entrusted with secrets warriors would otherwise keep from their unit lest they might lose face. Oftentimes religious, legal and honor-related concerns intersect in such cases, but this is inevitably anyway given how Sangheili society and the Covenant overall is set up. In addition, if the members of a legion have internal disputes, particularly between a superior and a subordinate, a Redeemer could be asked to judge the situation as an impartial "outsider". They could investigate cases of corruption or favoritism, ensuring the principle of meritocracy gets followed in practice. However, they are not always above corruption themselves, in spite of the solemn vows they must taken upon entering service and the very code of honor they supposedly enforce. This is in part because of the latitude they are given in interpreting the limits of their jurisdiction. Corrupt, cruel or harsh Redeemers are feared by the units into which they are assigned, and have, in rare cases, been known to meet "unfortunate accidents" in the field.

Redeemers are typically recruited from those in senior Quaestor positions, Ultras, and Special Operations units, which makes them formidable warriors even before they receive their specialized training and education. Because of the belief that they are preserving the integrity and respect of various organizations, they are highly respected and many follow their duties with a near-fanatical focus. While Redeemers have no option of becoming officers, their experience and knowledge make them valued advisors. Redeemers are expected to harshly punish those who refuse to face judgment for their crimes, although they have shown lenience to those that come forward and atone for their actions; ultimately, their inclinations for mercy depend on each Redeemer's individual character.

Within Covenant territorial holdings and the marches in particular, Redeemers work as traveling missionaries and lawmen, occupying a peculiar boundary between mercenaries and law enforcers. In this capacity their role somewhat overlaps with that of the Quaestors, who are also more numerous, though the Redeemers' duties are more specialized. They continue to enforce appropriate punishment against Sangheili individuals found guilty of blasphemous acts or wavering in their faith. Moreover, Redeemers are frequently paid to hunt down individuals who brought dishonor upon their peer group, such as a clan or state. This is usually done if that group is not able to handle the problem themselves or wishes for the matter to be handled with particular discretion and professionalism. In principle, Redeemers' jurisdiction is limited to a select number of duties, though in practice (and depending on the moral fiber of each Redeemer) they also undertake various other tasks that are only tangentially related. These actions rarely but occasionally extend to non-Sangheili subjects if a Redeemer seems extra-zealous regarding the duties of his station. In more civic roles, Redeemers ensure communities are reinforcing High Charity-led edicts to their constituents and perform ceremonial duties for the communities they visit; in this their roles overlap with those of senior Zealots. These peacetime duties tend to be less volatile compared to frontier and military duties and Redeemers of older stature tend to transition towards communal service as they age.

History
The Redeemers occupy a peculiar but vital role in the Sangheili meta-culture. Early on, the Sangheili realized the impossibility of effectively maintaining consistent cultural norms in the vast interstellar meta-civilization of the Covenant. Many new colonies would inevitably drift in their culture and lapse from the ways the "elite" of the species regarded as morally proper. One of these was the pervasive sense of honor, which has its roots in the Sangheili's deep past. But over a millennium into the Covenant, the Sangheili had become spread out across thousands of light-years, and many local civilizations on the planetary, system or realm level had little to do with one another. A consistent standard of honor could not be upheld across such a civilization when citizens of one world might have wildly divergent ideas as to what the concept even meant, or had already transitioned to exclusively legalistic systems of organizing society.

It has been argued that even the Sangheili mainstream (i.e. the societal and cultural norms regarded as proper on High Charity and most of the Sunlit Worlds) has long been an increasingly legalistic culture that prefers to think of itself as an honor-bound one out of pride and tradition. A society built on honor only truly works when that society is numerically and geographically contained enough for the honor system to be instilled universally to all members of that society; in addition, such cultures are typically born out of harsh environments where absolute trust and personal integrity are integral for the survival of the entire culture, usually no larger than a tribe or chiefdom. This applies very precisely to the Sangheili, who first arose to sapience and civilization in such conditions. However, such systems tend to break down with both scale and distance, as maintaining cultural cohesion becomes more difficult when numbers and communications range increases. As well, as technology and the standard of living improve and populations specialize, responsibility transfers increasingly from the individual to the overarching legislative framework they occupy, typically taking the form of some form of empire, nation-state, or intergovernmental union. Indeed, even planet-bound civilizations usually begin to replace or complement the traditional honor system with legalistic ones from early on, as nomadic cultures settle down and form organized civilizations which virtually require written laws and some form of law enforcement to remain organized. At this stage, both systems typically co-exist for a time, but with the honor system relegated to an increasingly secondary role. And even as their honor system remained in the background, the Sangheili were no exception to this.

With the Sangheili, the foundations for the system of honor as we know it today were born largely out of the interregnum that followed the Skyfall, as a sort of return to the species' roots after the preceding "Age of Decadence". By the time they arose to the stars again, local versions of the honor system remained fixtures of their cultures as they colonized space, and were in place in most of the major Sangheili societies that would into conflict with the San'Shyuum and later sign the Writ of Union. Even at this point, however, the honor systems largely operated on the individual and institutional level, and were complemented by robust legal institutions; even as little distinction often existed between the concepts of honor and law. The Redeemers first emerged when Sangheili splinter societies became so divergent from one another that some virtually discarded traditional honor and Sangheili cultural norms altogether; this was around the later years of the Covenant's Late Antiquity period, when the Covenant empire's expansion outpaced its ability to maintain consistent communication and cohesion within itself, giving rise to the civilization-wide splintering that characterized the Feudal Period. To the "mainstream" of High Charity and the Urs system, this was unacceptable, as it both called to mind the maligned Age of Decadence of the past, and actively eroded the pseudo-legalistic honor system from within. Hence the role of the Redeemer was born, as a means of both acting as a cultural advisor to educate Sangheili from various divergent cultures to the standards expected of them within the Covenant's martial organizations, along with enforcing that system by the sword where deviant individuals sought to exploit it.

Known Redeemers

 * Raxs 'Gatakurr - former Redeemer known for his corruption, left the unit to pursue a career in Covenant Special Operations.