With Sita located, Rama's monkey army builds a causeway of stones across the strait to Lanka, and a prolonged war follows between Rama's forces and Ravana's demon army, ending when Rama kills Ravana in single combat, a victory celebrated in much of India as the triumph of dharma, right conduct, over its opposite, and the origin of the festival of Dussehra. Sita is recovered, but Rama, mindful of public doubt about her conduct during a year in another man's household, requires her to undergo a trial by fire, which she survives unharmed, proving her purity, before the couple return in triumph to Ayodhya to be crowned.
Even this resolution is not final in every version: several major tellings have Rama later banish Sita again on the strength of continued public gossip despite the fire trial, sending her to live in a forest hermitage where she raises their twin sons alone. Paula Richman's edited volume Many Ramayanas documents just how differently South and Southeast Asian traditions have handled this and other parts of the story, treating the narrative as a living, regionally varied tradition rather than a single authoritative version.
Hanuman's role does not end with locating Sita: after being captured and having his tail set alight by Ravana's court in punishment for the intrusion, Hanuman uses the burning tail to set fire to a large part of Lanka before escaping back across the strait to report what he has found, an episode that becomes one of the most widely retold and dramatized moments of the entire epic in later performance traditions.