Successor factions of the Covenant Empire

The fall of the began in early 2553, with the loss of the faction's  leadership and its disastrous defeat during. The Covenant Empire's fall was due to a culmination of factors including the highly centralised nature of the Covenant's now-absent command elements, as divisive tensions between the Covenant's races at the revelation of the Prophet's lies during the, and the damage caused by the. As a result, the Covenant quickly fragmented as hundreds of separate groups broke away from it. Out of the Covenant's fall emerged hundreds of successor factions, led by a wide range of individuals with an equally diverse set of aims; as time went on, the number of separate factions decreased as smaller ones were eliminated or absorbed by larger ones. This article lists the major factions that succeeded the Covenant Empire post-fall, though will likely never be fully complete due to the complexity and pace of events that followed the disintegration of the Empire.

True Covenant
Immediately after the death and the fracturing of the Covenant, the Prophets of Foresight, Obedience and Wisdom were chosen to replace the Prophets of Truth,  and. Foresight however, along with the Chieftain Thietus, took sole control by staging a brutal coup against the other two prophets in February 2553; Wisdom was killed though Obedience fled with a force he commandeered, leaving Foresight in sole control of what remained of the Covenant forces. Thietus went a step further than Foresight's coup orders and ejected the remaining Prophets from the Covenant, though many had escaped with whatever forces they could seize and set themselves up inside pocket empires. Under Foresight, however, Prophets that joined or were absorbed into the Covenant through conquest were used as navy commanders; Prophets eventually made up the majority of the True Covenant's Navy commanders. Foresight and Thietus now had sole control over what they termed the 'true' Covenant, to distinguish it from others who considered themselves to be the original Covenant. Those who remained in Foresight's forces included most of Thietus's Brutes (several shipmasters deserted with their fleets to seek their own power), a substantial navy, growing numbers of Prophets and large numbers of and. While the True Covenant was the largest of the Covenant factions, its forces still only accounted for seventeen percent of the Covenant's military force at the height of its power. The True Covenant had little interest in attacking the race in the short term, and was more interested in consolidating its power and assimilating smaller Covenant breakaway factions to expand this power.

As the largest single Covenant successor faction, many saw ultimate reunification of the Covenant as something to be accomplished by the True Covenant; thus, it was the target of attack by the Alliance of Sangheili Clans and United Nations Space Command, who wished to see the Covenant remain divided and weak. Beginning in January 2556, however, internal fighting within the True Covenant significantly weakened its ability to fight; the ASC and UNSC ceased attacks on the now weakened faction, though attacks by independent Prophet and Brute warlords continued. This infighting soon emerged to be between the largely Brute-controlled Army, and the predominantly Prophet-commanded Navy, who were conducting a covert war against each other through assassinations and sabotage. This eventually transpired to be an attempt by the Prophet of Foresight to take sole control of the True Covenant by overthrowing the senior Brute commanders and replacing them with Prophets; Foresight had grown increasingly worried by Thietus's power as commander of the True Covenant's Jiralhanae. Thietus, motivated to overthrow Foresight by his mistrust of Prophets, Foresight's tactic ineptness, his own desire for power and existing control over the True Covenant's Brute commanders, staged counter attempts to overthrow the Prophet commanders using his own Brute forces. When these efforts proved futile by May 2556, he simply killed Foresight himself and assumed control of the True Covenant. By this point however, the True Covenant was in disarray and, though maintained the majority of its forces, was crippled by internal mistrust and confusion. Thietus himself was killed in September 2557 in the Bageera 5 incident.

Covenant Reborn
The Covenant Reborn was created on August 17 2553 by three prophets; the Prophet of Obedience, who was a High Prophet before he escaped Chieftain Thietus' coup of the Covenant, and the minor Prophets of Humility and Contrition, who had separately left the True Covenant before the expulsion of the Prophets. Between them, the prophets controlled more forces than the vast majority of splinter factions, and also assimilated a number of Jiralhanae-led fleets and Dosiac-based tribes which considerably bolstered their forces. The Prophets of Obedience, Humility and Contrition aimed to eliminate the Human race from the galaxy, to unify the Covenant and activate the Halo Array. The Covenant Reborn actively waged war against the Human race and the Alliance of Sangheili Clans, aiming to eradicate them and embark on the. This changed in July 2554 when the Holy Covenant launched a campaign to unify the Covenant Empire, which forced many of the smaller factions to fight for territory, including attacking the Covenant Reborn's borders. After the Holy Covenant's campaign failed and it disintegrated among the smaller factions, the Covenant Reborn turned its attention to other Covenant factions, and set about attempting to reunify the Covenant under its own banner by assimilating factions into itself. Humility was killed at the Battle of Korll on October 8 2555, while Contrition was killed under mysterious circumstances during Operation: REGAL SNAKE earlier that year. This left Obedience in sole command of the Covenant Reborn and gave him more power to wage war on the rest of the Covenant. The Covenant Reborn's campaign of sabotage and subversion between both the larger factions and the smaller ones led to a meeting being held by the leaders of the seven biggest factions on September 28, 2557. Obedience summoned the Covenant warlords to meet at Bageera 5, to deplore the state of the once great Covenant and to discuss reunification. However, the leaders of the splinter factions could not agree about anything, so Obedience instead executed them all and made himself Supreme Prophet of the reunified Covenant Empire. Following the warlords' deaths, Obedience took command of their forces, consolidating fleets of, , , frigates and corvettes, and even a single , taken from taken from Jiralhanae Warlord Cronus. The supercarrier, True Ascension, was renamed Unity by Obedience, and used as the flagship for the now reunified Covenant Imperial Navy.