Heroes 6 - Discussion

This passage is a bit unclear to me. What does "they made a choice for me" mean? There are always several options available (to be precise, 4), and you can always choose one of them. Moreover, I sometimes enjoyed giving a Knight from Haven (well, a secondary one, as an experiment) some negative skills and abilities, like dark magic. Sometimes, the combinations turned out to be very good.
And also: there is a mentor on the maps in Heroes 5 (I think that's what it's called) - you can exchange skills for other ones with him, in the end.