50 years ago on a planet named Harvest, the Covenant first appeared. They initially came with no hostile action towards humans. The covenant is a group of species banned together under a small group of highly intelligent beings they call the prophets. The prophets went through the universe searching for what are called forerunner artifacts. Planet harvest contained, or so they belived, a forerunner atrifact; so the covenant sent a small group of elites to speak with the human leaders hopeing to search for the artifact and be on their way.

      Planet harvest was a planet dedicated to farming for the outer colonies of the human planets. Being a farming planet, harvest didn't have a full military. Being humans, they were paranoid and frightened of the elites and their technology. A soldier watching guard over the meeting shot down an elite and killed him. The elites were infuriated by this outburst but took no hostile action toward the humans. The elites demanded life for life and the soldier was executed for his outburst. The meeting was then held on another day where a high ranking officer elite did not care for the humans attitude and killed the city's mayor. This aggression begat more aggression and the war between humans and the covenent began. The battle for the planet harvest was fierce and long. The humans held out against a full frontal assault but could not withstand the full power of the covenant. In the end, harvest, and all its inhabatants were annihilated and the planet was nothing but a glassed molten surface.

      The covenants very existance its solely based off of the forerunners, the most advanced beings who ever existed in this universe but long since have been extinct, leaving only remains of their advanced civilization through their technology. The forerunners are intellegent beings that have the ability to live forever. Each forerunner is born a forerunner, but as they get older usually their father or mother will implant their DNA into them turning them into 1 of 3 classes: a builder, a lifeshaper, or a warrior servant. Builders were the engineers and inventors of the forerunners. The very foundation of the forerunners techology is created by the builders. Lifeshapers monitor every species in the entire universe making sure they stay on track. They also take in any knowledge about them including taking the spirit of a fallen life and entering it into anothers mind as an imprint to exist only with that person, unless manifested into a machine by forerunners.

      In every class there is one forerunner who is the ultimate being of its class. For builders there is the master builder who foresees all major projects of the forrunners and is very prominent in forerunner politics. For life shapers it is the librarian who monitors every species and touches every important mind across the universe in her own special way, including imprinting spirits of the dead into the living. It is also her job to make sure that the other species never go extinct. For the warrior servants it is the didict. The didict, who is the librarians' husband, is the leader of all military action and the didict is present for all military decisions.

      Back when the forerunners existed, the humans were the second most advanced civilization. Long before the forerunners ceased to exist there was a war with the humans that lasted 100 years, but in the end, the forerunners won and sent the humans back to an age where they could not colonize other worlds and reduced there military power to nothing. But the humans were fighting a two front war, one against the forerunners and one against the flood (a parasitic organism which feeds on sentient life). During the human forerunner war, the humans pushed back the flood to the very corner of the universe. 10,000 years later the flood came back, this time against the forerunners. Try as they did they could not defeat them and in the end they destroyed themselves along with the flood. But the flood was never completly erased, only sealed away for millions of years on the 7 halos created by the forerunners.