User:BaconShelf/Collective

The Fel-Shiri Collective was an advanced civilisation occupying a portion of the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way galaxy during the early period of the Covenant's expansion.

History
Little is known of the true extent of the Fel-Shiri domains; their heartlands lie deep in the antispinward portsions of the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, much farther than all but the absolute furthest expeditions recorded by the Covenant's most dedicated explorers and scholars. As such, almost no contact has been conducted with the Fel-Shiri; all that is known of them comes from sporadic contact with a Fel-Shiri splinter culture which once colonised the Orion Arm some time prior to the 11th century CE; when the 14th Age of Discovery saw the Covenant conduct a series of major expansions in the trailing regions of the Orion Arm leading to the discovery of a small handful of colonised worlds.

At the time of this discovery, the Fel-Shiri colonies were separated over a few dozen light-years, and seemed to vary drastically in their levels of technological attainment. One world had a few hundred thousand inhabitants and a limited interplanetary space presence in its solar system; a few more had planetary civilisations in varying states ranging from industrial ages to more primitive tribal societies. At first, it was theorised that the Fel-Shiri may be an example of the out-of-place biota phenomenon, with the species having been planted on these worlds by the Forerunners long ago. Later discoveries of more worlds with a Fel-Shiri presence,

However, closer examinations and eventual communication with the Fel-Shiri revealed an

Old
, in the region now referred to as the Roqos Wasteland. Little is known of the civilisation in the modern day, partially due to the usual Covenant standards of record-keeping, and partially due to a concentrated effort by Covenant officials to remove their culture and legacy from history. In the modern day, the Fel-Shiri serve the Covenant as little more than one of many historical reminders of the enforcement of the Doctrine of Universal Conversion.

According to the Covenant's records, the Fel-Shiri were a neighbouring civilisation in the Roqos region of the Orion Spur during the antiquity eras of Covenant history (placed roughly in the 15-1600s on the Gregorian calender). Due to the nature of slipspace routes in the region, the Fel-Shiri made only sporadic contact with the Covenant of the time, with a handful of minor border conflicts made for several decades. Due to the sheer time and distance then-involved in traversing into the Roqos space, neither side was particularly able to influence the other to a major degree.

With the spread of Borer technology into the Ulannon region, local warlords began pushing into the Roqos star clusters evermore, with tensions eventually breaking out into a minor regional wars between the Fel-Shiri and the Covenant feudal lords of the region, with the Fel-Shiri occasionally playing rival Sangheili factions against one another. Eventually, these conflicts escalated with the Fel-Shiri demanded to submit to the Covenant hierarchy and fall into their religion. Naturally, the Fel-Shiri declined this "offer", beginning the 5th Age of Conversion, and a bloody Covenant offensive into Fel-Shiri space.

Initially, the war made little progress due to the few stops on the routes into Fel-Shiri space; having been the metaphorical writing on the wall, the Fel-Shiri had poured vast amounts of resource into preparing for invasion, and the slipspace route now known as the Halayen Desolation is littered with half a dozen star systems in which repeated back-and-forth battles over the same planets and moons over decades saw the same regions of the worlds bombarded with plasma and nuclear weapons several times. Even as of the 26th century, the orbits of these worlds remain perpetual orbital hazards due to debris remnants from these conflicts.

Despite the ferocity of the Fel-Shiri defense, they eventually began to falter due to the later arrival of dedicated fleets sent from High Charity. The Fel-Shiri had invested great efforts in fending off the initial invasion by the local Sangheili feudal lords, and were unprepared for a fresh new second wave of invasion. This fresh momentum saw that they were able to storm into the Fel-Shiri space and began a ruthless campaign of glassing world after world. Of particular significance was the Desecration of Relaan, in which the Sangheili warlord Jah 'Kostolee ordered the total glassing of every single major celestial body in the system, with particular attention given to an ice-moon whose surface was entirely melted from plasma bombardment. Relaan served as a regional headquarters of sorts, acting as a transit hub for a dozen surrounding star systems. With this major population and trade center gone and the Fel-Shiri utterly exhausted, the remaining colonies surrendered to the Covenant and were officially adopted into the faith, later classed in with the "Covenant fringe".