When you boot a bootloader from an encrypted disk, the bootloader decrypts the softraid drive in order to locate, and load the kernel before passing control to it. The decryption key is passed to the kernel, so that it can address the drive via softraid(4).
The only plaintext sectors on an FDE drive are MBR/GPT, and the bootloader. The kernel uses the softraid(4) driver to conduct I/O.
The RAMDISK kernel (bsd.rd) includes the softraid(4) driver.
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgradeXX.html
# cp bsd.rd /new.bsd.rd
# reboot
# passphrase:
boot> new.bsd.rd