My thought is that someone at Bungie may have been a 'Covenant' fan. There are other similarities in the backstory and the fact that in each case the foe still exists and now has to be defeated for good in the present time.
Before doing so, they sent the people they could out of the land and set up 7 Wards to reteach people when they eventually Reclaimed the Land, so that their knowledge wouldn't be lost. Rather than be defeated, they enacted the Ritual of Desecration and basically scorched the Land in the hope of killing both their foe and themselves in the process. Yet, in the end they were unable to stop their ultimate foe. In these 'Covenant' books, the ancient Lords of the Land were wise and powerful beyond the measure of the current lords (like Forerunner vs modern humans). This idea is based on the similarity between the backstory of the Forerunners igniting the Halo rings to try to destroy an unstoppable foe (and themselves with it) and the similar backstory in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I wonder if the name may be a subtle nod to 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant', by Stephen R Donaldson.