A Novel by Steven K

Memoria
Aeterna

Aionia he mneme. Eternal memory.
Byzantine funeral rite

Konstantin has been searching for 391 years.

He is a Memorious, one of a small number of people who cannot die in the ordinary way. When their bodies fail, they wake in a new one, carrying every memory of every life they have lived. For Konstantin, that means nearly a thousand years of memory, beginning in Constantinople in 1043, where he served in the Great Palace and fell in love with a woman named Theodora.

Then Theodora died. And was born again. And died again. Each time in a new body, a new name, a new life, with no memory of who she had been. Konstantin, unable to forget, began to search. He tracked her essence across centuries and continents, through the Crusades, the Black Death, the fall of Constantinople, the courts of Venice, the trenches of the Western Front. Each time he found her, he was a stranger. Each time he lost her, the search began again.

In modern Istanbul, Konstantin finds Ayse Demir, an elderly woman in a hospice bed, surrounded by her family. He knows it is Theodora. He has forty years with her this time, and for the first time in centuries, he considers the possibility that finding her was never the point.

Memoria Aeterna is a novel about memory, love, and what it costs to hold on. It spans 982 years, from the golden domes of Byzantium to the streets of modern Istanbul, asking one question: if you could track the person you love across every lifetime, would you? And what would you have to give up to stop?