Melody was born to two fundamentalist Christian parents in Minnesota. She was raised in a relatively sheltered, misogynistic environment for years, with her parents making the effort to create a good Christian housewife as she grew. Effort was made to suppress her other interests, things like science fiction, video games, and art. However, despite both her parents being human, by a fluke of fate, Melody was in fact a Wildtouched. She Awakened to her true nature as a Great Horned Owl Wildtouched at age 14, and due to the high-control environment, was unable to keep things secret for long.

Faced with something outside their belief system, her parents reacted poorly, ascribing the action to demonic influence and possession, immediately clamping down hard on Melody until she returned to ‘the light’, with abuse of multiple forms. This had the opposite intended effect; while she was no longer a free individual, the significant time spent alone allowed her to slowly break out of her shell and upbringing, as her own rebellious and decisive streak took hold.

On her 18th birthday, Melody was unceremoniously thrown out of the house with a single suitcase and told not to return. Not long after she received notice that she’d been disowned, which to her was not a surprise. Having had some plans for this by this point, she managed to work her way through to getting an art degree in college, though it was a lot of long hours at rough jobs and for low pay. By the time she was out of college, she was a multitalented artist and somewhat quintessential ‘nerd girl’. As Wildtouched weren’t publicly known, she managed to keep her alternate nature hidden from others, she started taking freelance work in art and design and commissions, christening herself as “Athena’s Aegis” in the convention circuit and making part of her living there.

Given her personal history, she has a distrust of people who publicly espouse their religion and the virtues thereof, and is also against drug use, given a friend of hers was killed in a hit-and-run by an intoxicated driver. After the Shroud was sundered and magic came back into the world, she realized that many others would be facing the same situation she did, and became involved in the nascent equal rights movement for paranormals, including Wildtouched, eventually becoming somewhat of a local organizer.