fire is magic, and its destructive power as a spell is to consume any and all material and reduce it to ash. Organic material works best -- wood, fabric, bone, and flesh -- but with enough practice a mage can burn through almost anything, including stone, metal, meya, and glass.
Reducing heat and light is a matter of pride for many mages. A flameless, smokeless fire is a sight to behold, objects simply crumbling away and scattering in the whipping wind, limbs seared off with hardly a scent of burning. The excess energy is siphoned off, either released into the ambient environment as mechanical energy (wind) or stored within containers for later use.
It becomes indistinguishable from dissolution at that point, but it is categorically different -- a combustion is a chemical change, and the matter turns to ash or another waste product; a dissolution keeps the material unchanged, simply severing constituent pieces with tiny bursts of magical force. The trick to recognizing it is the color change -- things blacken when they burn, but a dissolved piece of fabric retains its dye.












