After the war was over, after Rāma was king and everyone had gone home to their own lives, Hanumān went up into the mountains by himself.
He had been in the story. He had crossed the sea for it and carried the news back. Now he wanted to write it down — not for anyone, just written down, the way it had been.
He had no paper and no ink. So he wrote it on the rocks, with his nails, one line at a time, and it took him years.
And Vālmīki came up the mountain to read it.
Vālmīki was writing a Rāmāyaṇa too. His is the one we have. His is the one everybody has.
He walked along the rock face, reading. When he got to the end he sat down on one of the stones and did not say anything for a long time.
Because Hanumān's was better.
The story does not explain how. It just says he read it, and knew, and could not get up.
Hanumān watched his face and asked what was wrong. And Vālmīki said the true thing, which was a hard thing to say out loud: that now nobody would ever read his.
So Hanumān got up. He gathered the rocks — all of them, all those years of them — carried them to the edge of the mountain, and threw them into the sea.
Vālmīki shouted at him. What have you done?
And Hanumān said he had not written it for readers. He had written it for Rāma. It was finished the moment it was finished, and it had already done everything it was for.
The Rāmāyaṇa people have been reading ever since is Vālmīki's, and it is a great poem, and it is the one we have partly because Hanumān wanted it that way.
The strongest one in the story turned out to be strong about something else entirely.