Good grief now I've got a fairy tale running through MY head of three foxes who are SMART.

A younger brother, an older brother, and their sister who is between them in age. The younger brother is swift of tongue, though his clever mouth gets him into trouble just as often as it gets him out of it. The elder brother is swift of paw, and strong of arm. He was always the one called upon by their parents to chop firewood in the winter; though his firm muscles have not crowded out his brains, his wit is not as quick as his brother nor sister. The sister is the cleverest of all, and being a vixen, by far the prettiest. One day they set forth to seek their fortunes.

***

The youngest ventured south, and while on the road, came upon an overturned wagon. He made to help whoever was within, and discovered to his horror the driver's body, riddled with arrows and sporting a slit throat. Moments later, two soldiers rode up to the wagon along with the survivors of the highway robbery.

At first the young lad was not a suspect because the survivors remembered female bandits, and the silver-tongued fox was quick to note that he was indeed male. But the soldiers suspected he'd returned to the scene of the crime to more thoroughly loot the wagon, and noted that tricky foxes might crossdress in order to be misidentified.

The poor fox's tongue could not help him when they forced a dress on him, and the foolish wagoneers howled that he looked just like one of the gang who had robbed them. In fact, the bandit in question looked nothing like the young fox, but the wealthy merchants were of the opinion that all foxes looked alike.

The younger brother was condemned as a thief and a murderer, and as he was marched up the gallows steps, mockingly clad in the very dress that he had looked so pretty in, he thought to himself, "If only I had had my brother's muscles, then I would not have looked so good in a dress, and I would not be dying today."

And he fell through the trapdoor and hanged to death, and his body was taken to dangle from a tree along the highway as a warning to thieves.

***

The elder brother ventured north and found himself in a kingdom at war with a neighboring kingdom. He too met two soldiers along the road, and seeing how well-muscled the fox was, the soldiers immediately conscripted him into the army.

Being fleet of foot and strong of arm, the elder brother found himself excelling in combat, and quickly advanced to the highest ranks available to conscripts. He led his platoon to many victories, but he was troubled by the fact that he knew not what they were fighting for.

"I have no quarrel with the soldiers I do battle with," he mused to himself one night. "They are likely just as I am, fighting because they are told to fight, for the benefit of some noble. Surely there must be some other way to solve the problems of kingdoms."

Unfortunately for the elder brother, he was overheard by another soldier who sought to elevate himself by reporting misbehavior, and he gleefully reported the elder brother's words as treason. Because the fox truly believed in what he had said and could not think of a clever way to say he had been misheard, he was convicted of treason and sentenced to a soldier's death by beheading.

As he bowed his head on the block, wrists unchained as befit his rank, he thought to himself, "If only I had had my brother's silver tongue, then I could have talked my way out of the charge of treason, and I would not be dying today."

And the axe came down and split his neck just as he had split so much wood in his younger days, and his head was mounted on a pike as a warning to traitors, while his body was entombed in a stone vault with other fallen soldiers, since the kingdom had some very strange laws regarding corpses.

***

The sister decided to make her way through the forest to the east, living off of the land and making a map on parchment, for she loved learning. One day she came upon a stone tower, sitting on the edge of the forest with no road nearby, and only a small river to give it any semblance of a desirable spot to live.

"How odd!" she thought to herself. "What kind of person builds a tower with nothing to watch?" She walked around the tower, but could find no entrance.

Reasoning that no tower could have a use without a proper entrance, she decided it must be a hidden doorway and examined each stone carefully, prodding the cracks between with her small dagger to look for hidden catches.

But the sun set soon and she made her way back to the forest to catch some small prey to cook and eat.

The next day, the young fox girl returned to the tower and examined the stones on the other side, completing a circle around without finding a single trick to hide a doorway. Dejected, she returned to the forest. The vixen had run out of firewood and had not collected any more before the sun set, so focused was she on divining the secret of the tower. So like her ancestors, she had to eat her prey raw.

In the morning, the sister's belly hurt terribly; as a civilized fox, she had never before eaten uncooked prey, and it affected her terribly. When she dug a hole to deposit the previous day's meal in, the former feral squirrels and rabbits came out, to her perceptions, on fire. It took longer than usual for her to clean herself off and fill in the latrine, and therefore she was later in approaching the tower than she had been the past two days.

Thus it was that she saw a raccoon in a long black robe approaching the tower before he saw her, and that she hid in the brush at the edge of the forest.

"At last, that vixen is no longer meddling about with my tower," spoke the raccoon, who was in all appearances just like a mighty wizard from the tall tales the three siblings had heard long ago. He tapped a stone nine times in a peculiar rhythm, a stone that jutted out from the tower ever so slightly, that the sister had been sure must have something to do with the trick door... and a wooden door suddenly appeared over the top of the stones of the tower's base.

The vixen could not hide her smile as she approached the site of the vanished door the raccoon had entered the mysterious tower through. She remembered the rhythm clearly and tapped the same stone with the hilt of her dagger. On the first try, the door appeared just as it had before.

Brashly, the girl announced upon entry, "I have solved the puzzle of your tower, O mighty wizard!" The raccoon, who was indeed a wizard, was sore angered by the intrusion of this meddling little fox girl.

Indeed, he intended to obliterate her where she stood with a magical fireball. But the fox girl was indeed very pretty, and it had been a long time since the raccoon had had any companionship. So he agreed to spare her life if, in return, she would stay with him as his concubine.

The vixen agreed, and in time, proved her sharp wit so well that he took her on as his apprentice as well. She studied his extensive library of grimoires and became a powerful sorceress in her own right by the time the aging wizard decided to leave the mortal world.

Before he disintegrated himself, the raccoon instructed the fox girl, who had grown even prettier and wiser as she grew older, in how to summon his spirit from the netherworld, should she ever need his advice.

***

The fox girl, now a sorceress, decided to scry and divine what the fate of her brothers had been. Upon discovering their respective demises, she prepared several spell scrolls and traveled forth to find their bodies.

Her elder brother's head was now but a skull impaled on the pike, but his body had been well preserved in the soldiers' tomb. When she called the two together with a spell and infused them with his spirit, the elder brother became a mighty death knight, and pledged to do battle with any who would wage an unjust war.

Her younger brother's body had been picked clean by scavenging birds, and his skeleton still hung from the tree where he had been placed. When his spirit returned, he studied under his sister in the tower she had found so many years ago, and became a powerful lich in his own right. The youngest fox pledged to divine injustice and false accusations wherever they might exist, and to punish those who had been entrusted with legal authority but would condemn people without proper, logical evidence.

And the sister herself pledged to strengthen and empower people in the mortal world and the netherworld. Her raccoon mentor had long since retired to absorb sweet 'n' sour energy fields in the nether, and her parents had died of famine years ago and were quite happy in the world of the dead. But there were so many in the mortal world that could be made happier through the efforts of the three fox siblings.

And so the sorceress, the death knight, and the lich, three foxes, brothers and sister, worked to make people throughout the land happier, eliminating suffering and causing happiness wherever they could. And for a thousand years the land prospered under their guidance.