Quote Originally Posted by woweedd View Post
Not necessarily. The Snarl could emerge slowly with time: Think of the rifts as slowly waking him up, but it's not like all five gates break and he emerges immediately: More like every Gate that breaks wakes him up a little more. With this many rifts active, he's rolling around a lot, maybe even waking for a few brief seconds, but he's stuck in bed. With enough rifts, he's able to finally roll out of bed and start going about his day, or, in this metaphor, destroy the world. destroying the final Gate may not immediately wake him up, but it'd be a big enough push to force him into metaphorical-wakefulness, and after that, the end of the world would be a foregone conclusion within maybe a few hours.
See, I've taken it that the rifts are the places that the Snarl has chipped through. The worlds have been described as analogous to prisons that it is actively attempting to escape from.