A single voice, close and unhurried, over a low drone — and the drone is already moving. From the first seconds there's a faint, regular throb inside it, less a rhythm than footing, so the body finds its place before anything in the track has properly struck. The telling starts early: a queen is named, then the claim that she read dreams better than anyone. An invocation over a pulsing dark — that's the whole contract, stated quietly.

The chant breaks the telling open, the voice lifting into old vocables — hóhóhó — and at 0:47 the drums arrive with massed voices behind them. Nothing about the pulse changes; it only stops being implied. What was a voice with a throb underneath becomes a procession, the lone teller absorbed into a crowd, and from here the beat is underfoot.

Then the words turn to testimony — hón var vitr kona, she was a wise woman — and the floor answers by pulling out from under them: the drums and the crowd of voices thin away, and for a while the singer is nearly alone over the drone. The strange part is what doesn't leave. The body keeps walking. That faint throb in the low bed is still marking the beat with the loud furniture gone, a pocket that stays in the muscles whether or not anything strikes it. Into the quiet come some of the oldest lines the song carries — little sands, little seas, lítil eru geð guma, small are the minds of men — and the caveat that only the one who has wandered far and wide knows anything at all. The words describe a traveler; the music never stopped traveling. Lyric and pulse are telling the same story, one in images, the other in footfall.

When the ensemble gathers again approaching the two-minute mark, the words have caught up to the motion: she went as a night-farer, every road of Yggdrasil, moving in her wise form across the world of men and arriving at nine homes. At 2:32 the chant returns — the same vocables — and the change in the return is the point: it sits on a deeper floor this time, more voices stacked beneath it, the strikes leaning a shade off the grid like a march with loose shoulders. By the time the words bring back the thronging hosts from every world, word and music are finally the same size, both at full stride.

The last blows land around 3:33, drums beneath a wide-open choir, then one final strike — and the pulse, which held the body almost without a break for three and a half minutes, simply lets go. The ring of that last blow drains back into the low drone the song rose out of. It began as a voice over a humming dark; it ends as the hum.