Rita hands the knife back to Lambert, then watches, eyes wide with bewilderment, as Ignatius just takes off as soon as he's faced with Gild. She finds herself freezing up for a moment as Gild turns to her with that question... then sighs.

She might as well try to fill her in. Not just Gild's sake, either... There are a lot of people here who didn't see what happened to Ignatius and might appreciate an explanation.

"It's complicated," Rita begins, her arms folded. "The short of it is... the Mother of Invention poisoned him with ice magic. One of our people tried to cure him by calling on Creation, and... the result was some kind of synthesis. Instead of purging the ice from his body, it fused it with his domain... or something like that."

It's a phenomenon Rita would love to study, given the chance, but there hasn't exactly been time to figure out even the basics of what happened back there.