TALISH, AZERBAIJAN - Conflict can be long, slow and boring, especially for the civilians stuck in its midst, living a half life that is neither full war nor genuine peace.
It has been more than 20 years since a cease-fire formally ended fighting between ethnic Azeris and Armenians in the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
But the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia have regularly traded accusations of violence around the territory and on their common border.
This means villagers in the Caucasian enclave — recognized as part of Azerbaijan but controlled by ethnic Armenians — cannot get back to their old peacetime existence any more than they can stay on a perpetual war footing.
Instead they are stuck in a no-man's land, as conflict sputters on around them.
New prefabricated housing has been delivered to replace abandoned homes. Old land mines still erupt underfoot. Home is a warm memory, and the future is bleak and uncertain.
But it wasn't always like this.
Lida Sargsyan, an 82-year old ethnic Armenian, remembers a time when Azeris and Armenians lived side by side.
"We used to live normally together," she recalled, standing on a dry patch of land where pigs and cows loll in the sun. "The Azeris were living in our houses, we were living in their houses."
But that was decades ago, when the region was brought together under the Soviet Union — before war erupted in 1991.
By the time a truce was agreed upon three years later, 30,000 people had been killed, including three of Sargsyan's sons, and a million people had been displaced.
Clashes over Nagorno-Karabakh have intensified in the past three years, and efforts to secure a permanent settlement have all failed. There are fears that the neighbors are now closer to war over the enclave than at any time since the cease-fire.
So when, in the early hours of April 3, 2016, Sargsyan heard gunshots in her front-line village of Talish, she knew an attack was imminent.
Still in her farm clothes, she jumped into her neighbor's car and they made for Armenia's capital, Yerevan, leaving behind her home, a husband and pictures of her three dead sons.
"We left the house without anything," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation as she tried to hold back tears.
The small village of Talish, where Sargsyan lived until last year, lies 200 meters from the front line with Azeri forces, in the mountainous forest land that makes up Nagorno-Karabakh.
Today, Talish is empty but for a handful of men working on rebuilding houses.
The school lies in ruins, with books and children's drawings scattered all over.
The sporadic clashes turned into a violent flare-up in April of last year, killing dozens and displacing hundreds more.
In Talish, that "Four-Day War" feels as if it never ended.
Many of the families who fled the violence there have now resettled in Alashan, a small village 20 kilometers away.
"The people are waiting for a solution to the conflict in order to return home," Furio de Angelis, the U.N. refugee agency's representative in Azerbaijan, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from the country's capital, Baku.
But with no end in sight for the conflict, villagers displaced by conflict old and new are trying to rebuild their lives, like the victims of so many other wars.
"You see that in Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland," said Sinisa Malesevic, a sociology professor at University College Dublin.
"Many people are displaced but they are in areas that are highly militarized. There's a pressure that you have to be prepared, that war can explode at any time," Malesevic, who was born in Bosnia, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
"Some people are stuck in time — they think: 'Eventually we will return.' Some others decide to move on, migrate and look for a better life or settle where they are."
In Alashan, children are playing around the fountain while pigs and geese lie in the sun. The patch of land now boasts a school, a stable and two rows of temporary houses.
A group of men is measuring for a new house, one of a few dozen sent by the self-proclaimed government in Nagorno-Karabakh. They say there aren't enough houses for the 50 families who live here, most of them from Talish.
Still, the foldable prefabricated houses take just a month to build and last for years. The reconstruction of Talish drags on, and no one knows when, or whether, they will ever go back.