The Ascendancy has mistrusted and feared the Commonality ever since their agents were discovered operating on Ascendancy-controlled worlds. Powerful aliens with bizarre mental powers are an affront to the will and drive that the Ascendancy espouses, but at the same time, those powers could be very useful to the Houses in their machinations against each other. On an individual level, Ascendancy subjects and agents often find the Commonality to be arrogant, dismissive and haughty in public, and cunning and duplicitous in private. Subjects are counselled to always be on their guard when dealing with the Elysians.

The Dominion's first contact with the Ascendancy was with the evangelical scouts of a crusading armada. The First Tulaki War cost them many inhabited colonies as well as the secession of the Free Union worlds. Although there have been longer periods of peace than war since then, Ascendancy citizens are taught that the Tulaki are terrifying, warlike monsters. Things are more practical near the borders, where there is enough understanding of the Dominion's faith to make sense of their motivations - even then, they are regarded as mostly simple-minded barbarians to the atheistic Ascendancy. The Ascendancy Council bears grudges for a long time, and the memories of their many wars with the Dominion are still fairly fresh.

The spectrum of Ascendancy opinion towards the Free Union runs between traitorous anarchists and secessionists to misguided lost children of Terra whose egalitarian experiment will no doubt collapse in time. The way of life in the Free Union runs so counter to that in the Ascendancy that many Ascendancy Citizens consider the behaviour and actions of Free Union crews to be baffling and confusing. On the fringes, trade with the Free Union does exist, but the ruling Council regard the Free Union as wayward subjects, despite their inability to enforce their claim on them.