Trapped in mirror

Jaya laughed, and Jodah felt his heart seize and stutter. He reached with his free hand for his chest, but all his fingers closed around was the hard, unyielding surface of his mirror.

(...)

Jodah was aware he was elsewhere, and it was a familiar place. Despite himself, he reached for his throat but found the skin whole and unmarked. He let out a sigh of relief.

Then he stopped. He felt himself emotionally let out the sigh, but no air passed out of his lungs. He was not breathing and did not feel the need to breathe. He put his hand on his chest, feeling the first pulsation of a single heartbeat, flowing slowly into him, and with that pulsation a dull tug of pain.

He was trapped between heartbeats, and his consciousness was within his mirror. Outside in the real world, his body was fighting in its last desperate seconds to keep him alive, white mana burning like a hot coal in the back of his mind, his throat slashed open and his body splayed in a pool of his own blood— the sacrifice in some plan of Lim-Dûl’s.

(...)

Just as the doors to the parlor, now a pinkish glass, were about to burst, he looked around. Should he take the chance that he might have the spark, really? Would it be any better than willing his soul back into a dying body, sprawled on the bloodstained gallery floor? He could feel the body now, but it was flat and emotionless, like the old memories he had bleached of their related feelings. The savage pain in the throat, the labored, impossible pressure to breath, the bit of uncast mana searing his physical brain.

***

The Shattered Alliance, Chapter 14-15