High Charity

High Charity was the Covenant's holy capital city and main base of operations. An enormous mobile city-station, High Charity was the primary center of political, economic and religious power within the Holy Ecumene for the majority of the Covenant's existence, housing the High Council and much of the bureaucracy of the Covenant government, including the ministries. This changed with the Great Schism, which saw the city-station plunged into a violent civil war, then assimilated by the Flood. In the end, the converted husk of High Charity was destroyed at the Ark in the final weeks of 2552.

Design and construction
High Charity's infrastructure is as old and byzantine as the many, many ministries that designed and renovated it. The station was riddled with voids that were on no blueprint, telecommunication cables that went nowhere and connected with no system, and entire streets whose original purpose has been long forgotten. These inclusions and dropstones were the subject of many a legend that survive to this day.

Even High Charity's exterior design is the result of various successive phases of expansion over the course of Covenant history. It began as a somewhat sleeker structure and has had a lot of elements added to it over time; for one, the dome was originally much smaller and was only expanded to its latest diameter through various stages to accommodate the city's growth over time. Much of the length of the Unbreakable Spine is probably original construction, but had much fewer docking structures around it at the start. Internally, large chunks of the city have been effectively rebuilt several times, though there are sections deep within that are original.

The same goes for tech. While select pieces of tech such as the engines are original, the Holy City has had just about every game-changing Forerunner discovery embedded to it over the ages; particularly relics too large for any other Covenant ship to transport. Many of the temples in the holy city are Forerunner structures transported there from worlds' surfaces or Forerunner installations in space.

Historical events also left their mark on the holy city. After the latest Unggoy Rebellion, devastated sections of High Charity were rebuilt so as to be less labyrinthine, with large streets easier for heavy vehicles such as Scarabs to traverse; for much of the Unggoy rebels' advantage had come from the maze-like environments of their quarters.

History
After its completion, High Charity became the main driver of major colonization efforts with its faster drive and massive internal resources.

The Silent Passengers
One of the more persistent myths within High Charity were of the Silent Passengers. So go the rumors, when High Charity spent five years over Zhoist, a cabal of disembodied Oracles made a pact with a foolhardy San'Shyuum. If this Junior Minister, whose name has been lost to the ages, were to make some alterations to the communication infrastructure, they would reward him well. He did so, and they explained to him the location of a minor data archive under the Third City.

So this went on for another year, with each small favor rewarded with a little nugget of knowledge that would raise the Junior Minister’s stature, until he trapped one of the Oracles in a black box. No longer content to bargain for each morsel of information, he planned to extract the Oracle’s memories to peruse at his leisure. In retaliation, the cabal revealed the Minister in public to be a lecher and an embezzler. He was tried and executed, and the cabal was free to infiltrate High Charity. They became the Silent Passengers. For ages they rode the station through the Holy Ecumene, influencing its affairs in ways too subtle to detect.

Officially, the Silent Passengers didn't exist. If they did, then all of the ministries would mobilize to hunt them down and contain them, for there is no knowing where their loyalties lie. But tales abound of the fools who have struck deals with them, and the poor souls who have unexpectedly received their help. Indeed, even though the ecclesiarchy did their best to tamp out worship of the Silent Passengers, there were many shrines raised to those disembodied Oracles, and many denizens of High Charity would cry out loud for their help in times of trouble.