From the journals of Azreel the Disturbed, self-named “Chronicler of Worlds”:
SHAARAKA refers to a loose-knit group of warrior women tribes that share a single religious and cultural vision. They are hated by all.
The rest of the Shared World considers the Shaaraka tribeswomen to be cannibals, although they insist they are not cannibals, since they do not eat other Shaaraka. Instead, the Shaaraka survive on a diet of female victims, which they kill during hunting raids.
Shaaraka only eat women, since they consider men to be worthless. The only use they have for men is to fuel fires, construct tools from bone or skin, or for temporary slave labour. To reproduce, the Shaaraka enslave and rape men, then kill them once they have begun to show signs of pregnancy. The Shaaraka consider this to be a great shame, but one they must bear in order to bring more women into the world. Shaaraka kill all male children.
Shaaraka do not build cities. Instead, every forty-two moons, all Shaaraka tribes gather in a temporary encampment that they call Shalarax. Despite there being no fixed location for Shalarax, the Shaaraka consider each encampment to be an instantiation of the same city, and these gatherings to be a return to their homeland. They set the location of the next Shalarax gathering at the end of each encampment.
Shaaraka are otherwise nomadic and do not construct any sort of building or practice any sort of agriculture. The only structure they construct is a simple circle of stones, which they treat as a temporary home. No Shaaraka may enter a circle of stones except by invitation, under pain of exile. Shaaraka fear nothing more than exile, which for them means to stop being a Shaaraka. Any Shaaraka exiled has, as they say, “entered the world of meat.”
Shaaraka society has two classes: warriors and priestesses. Warriors may become priestesses by undergoing a lengthy, violent ritual in which they perfectly respond in a very codified manner to particular questions and have specific sigils tattooed on their skin. These tattoos are considered to confer the protection and blessings of light goddesses. The Shaaraka otherwise hate and fear all magical power and consider the sorcerers of other peoples, especially the Vani, to be servants of dark goddesses.
Any error made during this ritual results in a woman’s failure to become a priestess. Warriors must give up their status as Shaaraka at the start of the ritual and only regain this status at the successful close of the ritual. Any failure during the ritual thus results in exile, slaughter, and consumption.
On rare occasions, Shaaraka choose exile. They may only do this during the above-noted ritual, in a specific manner. In that instance, to properly complete the ritual, the Shaaraka woman must kill and eat her mother. Any Shaaraka who has done this is considered not only to be exiled, but also to be tainted. No other Shaaraka will eat them, even though they have entered the world of meat, and a Shaaraka warrior will even find killing the self-exiled woman distasteful.
Despite the hateful nature of their fearsome and vicious culture, Shaaraka society is shockingly stable. Some scholars consider them to be the oldest unchanged culture in the Shared World, although since the whole world is not known, such claims are impossible to prove. But no scholar records any change in Shaaraka culture in the whole of recorded history. And in that time, less than a hundred Shaaraka have ever chosen self-exile, the most notorious of which is Draxas, she whom the Shaaraka refuse to name and who they simply call “Her.”