Pile Tender

Remnant of a Worldwide Plague

The global catastrophe known as the Great Spell Plague was a grim period of Arrhynsian history. As the Great Spell Plague killed hundreds of thousands across the continent, as was customary, the bodies of the dead were buried in local graveyards in communities where the living had spent their lives. The problem was, the dead didn't stay dead.
As the victims of the plague self-resurrected as undead, the governments of Arrhynsia had to deal with communities in complete panic. Bad enough to deal with a deadly plague with a no known cause, but now the dead re-animated.
The solution? Bring them to Styx, and put them in the Pile.

A Reason to Be

Located in the town of Styx, "the Pile" is a thing of horror, filled with dead bodies charged with necromantic energy.
Styx was selected as the site of the Pile due to it's central location. People could get to the town by boat on the river Styx, or over a road that crossed the continent from east to west. Styx was far enough away from population centers that the undead would not return home, but close enough that community undertakers could transport the victims there. The governments of Arrhynsia paid a lot of money to the residents of Styx to take their necromantically charged dead into the Styx cemetary, and they hired workers to tend the dead.
When an undertaker had bodies of people who had died of the Great Spell Plague, they would place a them in an Undercart then drive them to Styx. Once there, the undertakers left the bodies at the fringe of the Pile, and the Pile Tenders would take the rest of the process from there.
A Pile Tender was an extremely well paid job, and most of the people in Styx were Pile Tenders. A Pile Tender would renew the spells that kept the Pile quiet, and bury the bodies in the Pile into the huge graveyard surrounding Styx. Spells and prayers were spoken over the bodies as they were interred to keep the dead from rising. Occasionally these worked the first time, but more typically, bodies would need to be buried two or three times before the spirits and bodies would stay in their graves. Some strong willed individuals would rise and need to be laid repeatedly, and these became quite friendly to the Pile Tenders. A good Pile Tender could process as many as three bodies a day if they didn't have to re-bury anyone.
Since the Great Spell Plague was over a hundred years ago, the human government occasionally forgets it's financial obligations to the town of Styx, but the township has no particular problem with refreshing the human government of the value of their services. They simply don't retreive and rebury the human undead and allow them to return home. The back payments and accounts are brought up to date within a month.
At the current size of the Pile, with the current number of Tenders, at the rate of daily burial, the current estimates are that all the bodies in the Pile should be permanently buried in 629 years.