Lesser Ring

Lesser Rings or False Rings, as they are called by the Covenant, are a category of ring-shaped Forerunner habitats. Despite their overall shape, Lesser Rings appear to be unconnected to the Halo Array and predate the Diluvial War. They seem to have been used solely for civilian habitation and lack weapons outside standard debris point defenses. Most of these habitat rings were likely either destroyed by the Flood or self-destructed as part of the Forerunners' scorched-earth tactics.

The Covenant found one such ring in the 8th century CE, an event that ushered in the 6th Age of Reclamation. While in a semi-decrepit state, with many of its self-repair systems failing, the ring's discovery was met by the Covenant with great enthusiasm. Although now easily distinguished from a Halo ring, the Covenant at the time did not know the details of what a Halo looked like; only that they were large Forerunner ringworlds. The empire-wide celebration over the discovery of what was thought to be a Sacred Ring gradually turned into what was perhaps the largest anticlimax in Covenant history as further studies revealed with certainty the ring's true nature, and the clergy was forced to admit to the general population that the Great Journey had been postponed indefinitely. The High Council's subsequent loss of credibility, while temporary, is often cited as one of the many causes for the waning of High Charity's central power as Late Antiquity neared its end. The Covenant would subsequently learn to temper their expectations when it came to Forerunner ring-shaped stations, with multi-stage identification protocols in place to ensure that a newly-discovered ring was, in fact, a Halo before formal celebrations were to be instituted. Even if a Covenant fleet came across a ring, only special science vessels and finally, a direct confirmation by High Charity could fully verify the nature of a Sacred Ring.

The habitat-ring found by the Covenant was subsequently named the Ring of Humility and Patience. The structure, which is anchored in a Lagrange point around a gas giant much like the Halos, is around 7,000 kilometers in diameter and proportionally wider than a Halo, with a set of spokes along its outer rim housing heat-management systems and attitude-control engines. No neurologically complex fauna is present. Despite the anticlimax surrounding its discovery, the Covenant did manage to extract some useful technologies from the structure despite its decayed state, these being largely useful in civilian applications. The Ring of Humility and Patience was consecrated as a shrine and has been a common pilgrimage site since, with a permanent monastic population aboard. In Covenant doctrine, the Ring of Humility and Patience would subsequently be known as a valuable lesson in the Covenant's fallibility and a caution against jumping to conclusions on their quest to know the ways of the Gods. The story was most often repeated to discovery-priests in training, so that they would rely on the evidence, not their own preconceptions, when studying the purposes and functions of holy relics.

Debris identified as the remains of other habitat rings has been discovered in other systems since then, with scholars able to gain hints as to the size and form these structures once took. It is apparent that the habitat rings were much more varied than the Halos in design and construction; some had hubs and other protrusions that set them apart from the Halo rings, and their proportions and size varied.