(EW Spoilers) Tales from the Dawn #5 - Days Gone By, Days Yet to Come

[reginleif-]

I think what Reginleif meant was that English uses the word "soul", whereas other language just comment on the physical Fandaniel: a black lump, a black mass, and a black thing in EN, FR and DE.

Yeah, I think here "soul" is being used in the same way you could refer to people in English as "souls" rather than mean their spirit. The writer does the same thing earlier in the story when they refer to someone as an "industrious soul".

Though considering Hythlodaeus is a character who can actually see the colors of peoples' souls and is switching between normal and soul-sight in order to track Azem, I probably would've used a different word here instead of "soul" to avoid confusion.

Exactly

As for the sable color—in everyday life, it really is a hue of brown. Google for reference sable paint, sable hair, sable nails, sable dogs. The elaborated wording collided with the common, widespread meaning of the word. So we got “a soul of a brown color” in English versus “a dark figure” in the original.

On the other hand, I don't really know what a color of a soul would actually do for us. We know souls have colors at least by some forms of observation--according to an ALC quest ours is blue--but there's never been any indication those colors mean anything. Like, genuine question, not being rhetorical or sarcastic: what would it even mean for... anything, if Hyth said someone's soul was puce? What meaning could that even carry?

I think the color itself is not important, it can be any. Promising is the context of the color of an original soul and its later reincarnations and shards. Like Hythlodaeus says in Elpis that the color of our soul “is almost identical to Azem's,” and that almost has nothing with the aether density, its thinness is discussed separately. This opens a room for guesses. (If I have missed some context, I'm open for corrections!)

Also, before this story, the color of Fandaniel’s soul was twice brought to our attention: in 5.1 by Zenos as “That hue. Your soul is...”, and in 6.0 by Hythlodaeus as “That color I know.” The mention of the color in the story felt like the resolution of the rule of three storytelling device—after two teasings the color is finally revealed. I’m glad I checked other languages before jumping to conclusions.