Your souls won't disappear from disuse, in fact they are souls so I don't even think they will get dusty :P

The souls are commonly referred to as character slots although it's not a Perfect analogy, and if you don't use them they simply go until you do.

Sparks of life simply allow you to take one of your souls and spark it into a character in game so you can play that character for up to 52 weeks of gameplay. If you want to have more than one character you will both need multiple souls and multiple sparks, one for each. That being said you can save your souls or sparks for later use, and theoretically only use your sparks of life on one soul your entire time playing CoE if you so choose as it won't disappear after use, only your spark of life does.

Lemme know if you have any other questions :P

edit: just to more directly answer your questions, yes you can reuse souls over and over again, that is their intent. You will lose your spark of life on perma-death, your soul can reincarnate into a new character.

Hey Kleine, to answer some of your questions.Posted By kleinebozebeer at 6:21 PM - Fri Jun 07 2019

Would you have to buy more sparks to eighter reincarnate the used souls or spark to life the other two souls you get?

Yes. If you want to reuse a soul after a characters death, or to use more than one soul you will need to get additional sparks of life. It's essentially CoEs subscription model, and although you can earn Story Points by being active in the game and get sparks of life through redemption, the traditional way is to simply buy more, currently $25 each but likely to go up by launch.

Which in reality $25 for up to a year of play is a good deal as far as subs go, imo.

I wouldn't expect sparks of life to be used more then once each, but why not just sell souls and sparks seperately?

Actually they will be sold separately at some point, and after launch. You can buy additional sparks of life now and past launch, and at some point Soul Packs will be available for purchase which will let you buy a pack of 3 souls that are themed based roughly on that souls starting skill ramps, like a crafter pack, or a blacksmith pack, or whatever. Still TBD on the packs atm :P

Does a soul have stats like talents or characteristics before it is initially sparked?

Yes souls will have characteristics before being sparked into them (not talents as those are by character life now) and you will be able to see these characteristics prior to putting said soul into a character.

If so this could influence the path one might choose based on the possible souls.

Certainly. If you aren't sure what you want to do and you are one of the lucky people that gets an old Soul with particularly high skill ramps in a certain area, you may well decide that you want to try said area out for yourself to get a feel for it :D