Advisory body to the Free Peoples, the loose cultural union of mature sapient races in the Scattered Worlds, headquartered on Nephestal. The Council meets, more or less continually, in the Assembly Hall.
The population of the Free Peoples is very difficult to estimate, since no regular census is ever taken. Each of the great Empires of the Scattered Worlds left about a billion or so in its wake, or about 6 billion including the Daamin. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. The Temple of All Worlds does homage to perhaps a million planets, each with its own native population of Free People. These populations total somewhere between 3 and 5 trillion.
Perhaps one in a million is fit to be a Galactic Rider; thus there are an estimated four million Galactic Riders around at any given time.