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- It snows a good seven or eight months out of the year.  It is the height of summer when Alisha arrives, and Sorey and Mikleo leave on their journey.  They are shocked to learn that in lower altitude places, it only snows for three or four months, or less.  I mean, they’d read about it in books, but never fully believed it.

- They probably have wicked survival skills for extreme cold and snow.  If they ever encountered it, everyone except for Edna (because she also lived on a mountain) would be completely floundering, and Sorey and Mikleo are just calmly digging proper snow caves for shelter and giving out important instructions such as, ‘no you can’t just eat the snow for water, your body looses more water in the process of melting it than it gains.  You have to melt it on a fire first.’

- The short growing season in Elysia the main reason why Sorey is far more experienced with hunting and animal husbandry, and why there aren’t any signs of farms around the village.  They keep some small gardens, certainly, mostly planted with winter vegetables and supported in the spring and fall months by fire and earth seraphs to keep the plants alive, but anything bigger than that is impractical.

- The other consequence of a short growing season is that the flowers are tiny.  They are used to daisies and anemones the size of a fingernail, and they spend hours marveling over bouquets of flowers in Ladylake, because they had no idea that flowers could get that big.

- In the summer, lightning storms can blow up in an instant, and are incredibly dangerous because there are not many options for what it might strike.  Zenrus has spent far too many storms to count redirecting lightning away from people and homes.

- The reason Sorey seems to run everywhere is because he can.  He’s spent a whole lifetime running and playing and training at insane altitudes, and he seems pretty fit up there.  Coming down to lower altitudes, there’s just so much more oxygen in his lungs, and that makes his endurance incomparable.

On Elysia, Home of the Seraphim

Or: A theory, a mini-essay, and some headcanons based on that theory

Okay, so something I have seen around, mainly in fanfiction and such, is that sometimes Elysia is portrayed as being located on a rather large hill.  Now, the way you move around the game would seem to support this - you don’t have to walk for ages through the Aroundight Forest, nor are there any drastically steep slopes.  But, there’s one thing that stands out to me and indicates that Elysia is actually at extreme altitude - there are trees just above the Mabinogio Ruins:

But, there are no trees at all within the village itself, which is up the hill from Mabinogio:

Now, I can’t particularly see the seraphim clearing all of the trees from the village, especially as beings who are in-tune with nature and often live in it.  Not to mention, the houses are made mostly of stone, so they wouldn’t have been chopped down for building purposes.  So, what this tells me is that they are living right on the tree line.  That puts the altitude between 10-12 thousand feet, or 3-3.5 kilometers, above sea level.

This is corroborated by the fact that Elysia is often shown as being above the clouds:

As someone who has lived at high altitude (although not this extreme of an altitude) her whole life, I can tell you that puts a different perspective on what the experience of living in Elysia, and subsequently leaving, would be like.  And so, onto the headcanons:

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