Jed Calvert - "Is it a dream?" part2

Who: Jed Calvert
Where: Another place
When: Another time
Jed turned away from the bodies, unable to look at the many longer.
Plus, there was something new he had to focus his attention on. He
had to find the woman's voice.
He could hear it on the wind. It was saying something that he
couldn't quite hear.
Lightning lit the darkened scenery and Jed could see what sort of a
landscape he was in. Hills surrounded him, as if he was in a large
crater. He assumed the crater hadn't been formed recently as trees
grew all around him. Dark and looming trees, the type that cast
horrible shadows.
In the moonlight he could see plenty of nasty shadows, but they
didn't scare him. Nothing scared him anymore.
As he scrabbled up the steep hill, he could hear the woman's voice
more clearly now. It was the voice of a young woman, maybe a girl,
and she was singing. He couldn't believe why anyone would sing in a
place like this, at a time like this.
He stopped. Where was he again? He struggled to remember why he was
here, and gave up. He just focussed on the voice. He could hear it
clearer now.
...he had ten thousand men.
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again.
Ohhh.... The grand old Duke of York...
The incline was steep and very unsteady. He used his blood stained
hands to pull on tree roots and use them to stop him from falling.
Gravel and soil moved under his feet and he fell flat onto his face.
The tree roots scratched him, and blood poured down a cut on his
cheek, but it didn't show as much as the dried blood that was already
there.
He crawled on all fours like an animal over a thick tree root and
through a prickly bush. Eventually he stopped, and let his body sag
onto the wet floor. But it didn't matter now. As she was in front of
him.
He used all of his remaining energy to look up from the floor. A
woman sat over on a tree stump. She was beautiful, she radiated
with... she radiated. He had to squint as he looked at her, she
glowed so much that it hurt his eyes. She was a young woman with long
hair that framed her face. She wore some kind of casual dress like no
style Jed had seen before. But as the only girls Jed ever saw wearing
dresses were strippers, that didn't count for much. It was pristine
and white, and flowed down to her knees.
Jed wondered how she had kept so clean here. He didn't even need to
look at himself to compare how filthy he was to her.
She stopped singing and looked at him with a ready smile. "Hello."
she said. She didn't have much of an accent, it was plain but
friendly.
She walked over to him and stood over him. Jed scrabbled himself off
the floor and into a sitting position. It hurt too much for him to
stand right now. He just looked up to her as if he was some kind of
child looking up at an adult.
"How's the grand old duke of York today?" she asked him.
"Eh?" Jed asked.
"That's you silly." she laughed.
"Oh... are you sure... I don't know who I am." Jed said, hitting his
head with a filthy fist.
The woman just grinned.
Jed was quiet for a moment and he studied her glowing face. He spoke
after a while. His voice was simple, like a child's. "Are ya an
angel?" he asked.
The woman thought about this for a second, then said in a very
patronising voice. "Yes. That's it. An angel."
"Oh." Said Jed.
It was a few seconds before the woman spoke again. "I have to remind
you Jed. That you're still human. Always remember that."
"Right." said Jed, confused.
With that, the woman clicked her fingers and disappeared.
Jed sat for a moment looking ashamedly at the blood on his hands. He
tried to scrape it off onto a nearby tree trunk but it just scratched
his skin. He sat for a moment longer.
And then they came for him.